


Desire to Leave a Scar

by objectlesson



Category: Battlestar Galactica (1978)
Genre: Academy Era, Angst, College, Drinking, Fighting, First Time, Internal Conflict, Internalized Homophobia, Kissing, M/M, Military Training, Promiscuity, Repression, Sexual Tension, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Studying, Swimming
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2019-11-26
Packaged: 2021-01-30 12:44:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 23,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21428431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: You want to know everything about Starbuck, so nothing will shock you to sudden, confusing sickness anymore. Or at least you think that’s why you want to know everything about him.
Relationships: Apollo (BSG 1978)/Starbuck (BSG 1978), Starbuck/OFCs, Starbuck/Zak
Comments: 12
Kudos: 20





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hmmmm. I recently went through all my THOUSANDS of documents to organize them and put them into folders and shit. I have literally hundreds of WIPs, and for SOME FUCKING REASON, this thing I started four whole years ago in a fandom no one cares about caught my attention. I wrote it when I was moving and relying heavily on my family, and I'm in that place again, so maybe thats why it called to me. ANYWAY, I decided to finish it. Here's the first part, expect two more chapters at least. It's stupid long. 
> 
> For those of you who know nothing about this fandom but want to read: have fun! it's a college fic that takes place on a military base in a fictional galaxy. Apollo, the speaker, is a rich-boy commander's son with zero self awareness. He'll tell you everything you need to know about Starbuck. 
> 
> There's a while language for this verse, I think they did it to get away with cursing on TV? Anyway! Daggit is dog, frack is fuck, yahrens are years, centons are minutes, ambrosa is booze, grog is beer, pyramid is cards, and most hilariously of all, triad is some form of like...basketball where you're very scantily clad. I recommend pictures. ANYWAY!! here'sare some very cheesy, very repressed, very pretty 70s boys.

The first time you see him is on the lawn outside the Colonial Base Academy, hair shining in the Caprican sun like fields of wheat you remember from your boyhood summers spent wild and dirty north of the capitol. You think he must be an upperclassmen just by the way he’s standing like he owns the grass beneath his boots, the way he has a small crowd of mostly girls all gathered around him with their faces tilted skyward, mouths open and laughing as he gestures his way through a story, aviators flashing. As you get closer, notice that he can’t be much older than you, likely a new student. You also notice he might be from Arieon. Sagitarion, even. 

You hear your father’s voice in the back of your head, its stern echo stating _The Academy isn’t what it used to be, Apollo. It’s still a fine institution, but they’ve lowered the admission bar, started handing out scholarships to any old kid with a dream. You watch yourself, and remember who you are, where you come from. Don’t go mixing up with the wrong type._

You grit your teeth and shake your head you pass this boy with his golden hair and his smile like a torch, and think he might be the sort your father had been referring to. 

It took you longer than most boys to realize your parents were full of fallacies and incongruities, especially your father. You’re still getting used to the ways in which he contradicts himself, the ways in which he’s prejudiced and old fashioned. You’re just beginning to forge your own way, deciding which of his pearls of wisdom are truly worth treasuring, and those which are too imbedded in old prejudice they warrant interrogation. You decide that his advice to treat everyone you meet as if they are a member of the Quorum, worthy of respect and kindness, supersedes his warning that you may encounter _any old kid with a dream._

So_, _you smile to the boy in passing, catching his eye between the heads of the crowd and nodding to him. He cocks his head and grins back, like the two of you are sharing some secret together, though you have never met. There’s a mysterious, unnamed twist of something in your gut, then it’s gone. 

\---

It takes you awhile to figure out that the Starbuck you keep hearing about is the same person as the boy from the lawn, but once you do, it makes a shameful sort of sense. You don’t want your father to be right, you don’t want stereotypes to be true, but the stories flying around the Academy about Starbuck suit him, his hard edges and the reckless, scrappy farm-colony look about him. 

You hear he’s a promising student riding on a lot of scholarship money, that he’s a natural, the kind of smart that doesn’t have to _try_ to make passing marks. But you also hear he has a gambling problem, that he stumbles into lectures hungover and reeking of ambrosa, he’s broken at least a dozen girls hearts already and is on his way to breaking a few more. You hear he tried to light a cigar in the middle of a flight demo, and merely shrugged, put it out on his boot, and pocketed it again instead of leaving the hangar deck like he was asked to. Starbuck is already the beginnings of a legend at the Colonial Base Academy, and he hasn’t even been there half a yahren. You’re not sure why, but this makes you half irritated, half intrigued. It’s the kind of attention you have been taught your whole life to avoid, but there’s something appealing about watching a boy your age and with your talents, this alternate version of you, stomp through life so unapologetically, when a _sorry_ is always ready on your on lips, eager to be preformed. 

It’s not until some friends drag you to a loud, ambrosa-sodden party off campus that you’re actually introduced to Starbuck in any sort of formal way. You shake his hand across a Pyramid table that’s heavy with his winnings, blinking and coughing in the billow of smoke he’s surrounded in. “I’m Apollo,” you choke, eyes streaming. “Nice to finally meet you. I’ve heard a few stories.” 

Starbuck grins brilliantly at you, shakes a wing of blonde hair from his eyes and squeezes your palm almost too hard, fingers sliding down to your wrist in this way that unsettles you in its forwardness, its natural, charismatic dominance. “Heya, Apollo. Heard of you, too. Pretty crazy to think word of little old me has reached the ears of the mighty Commander Adama’s prettyboy son,” he says. Then he winks, still gripping your wrist. 

It takes you a moment to realize he’s being intentionally rude. You don’t spend much time around people whose interactions aren’t ruled by formality and protocol, and it shocks you silent, makes you stand there blinking smoke from your eyes wondering what would warrant such clear, open dislike. “Pretty boy?” You finally say, cocking an eyebrow and smiling it off, like maybe this is a joke, as if you are two old friends who tease each other about this kind of thing, instead of just two two strangers who met at a party. 

Starbuck shrugs and finally lets you go, hand falling to rest atop his stack of coins, crumpled bills, and a single scuffed but expensive looking wristwatch. “Heard you were rich,” Starbuck responds, cocking his head. “Didn’t know you were a looker, too. Some guys get all the luck, eh Jolly?” He grins, elbowing the guy next to him, a sloppy looking drunk kid with a mustache, clearly older than the both of you. 

With that he turns away from you completely, addressing the table of disgruntled looking pyramid players, chewing on his cigar and huffing smoke from his nose. “Alright, sweethearts! Whose dealing? Whose losing to me this hand?” He crows, eyes the color of a sunny sky flashing even through the haze of smoke. 

You remain for a moment, waiting to see if he turns back to you, if he’s going to apologize for giving you a hard time and offer you a drink, offer you a chair at the table, prove it’s a joke. However, centons pass, and he doesn’t. You decide that your father would not treat Starbuck with the same respect and kindness as a member of the Quorum, despite the ways in which he raised he sons. You decide your father wouldn’t _like_ Starbuck at all. You decide you don’t like him much either. 

\---

You get tired of hearing his name, tired of the unavoidable flicker of sickness which clenches in the pit of your gut every time someone mentions him, especially if it’s with awe, admiration, incredulity. You’re not sure why, but Starbuck’s popularity among your classmates, the way his name works its way insidiously into weekend anecdotes, makes your stomach flicker in confusion. You can’t _avoid _it, though. If there’s action happening, if there’s thrill or adventure at the Colonial Base, Starbuck is in the thick of it. sometimes the hero of the story, sometimes the villain, but always the star. 

It drives you crazy. You enrolled in the Academy because it was what was expected of you, the obvious next step in your life of gradually rising to be the man your father wants you to be, the man your father _is_. However, at least part of your authentic interest in joining the fleet is the promise of action, thrill, adventure. But now that you’re _here_, you avoid the action, miss in favor of your studies. 

You skip the parties, decline invitations from your fellow cadets to spend nights out in Caprica using their uniforms to trick girls into thinking they’re honorable. You forgo the action in the meantime because you trust your father’s assurance that if you make the top of your class and graduate with stellar marks, you can climb through the ranks at your leisure and deliver yourself straight into the brilliant, star-sewn fabric of space. Where the _true_ action lies, the wildest thrill, the purest adventure. 

This is what you tell yourself when you hear about whatever daring, riotous new thing Starbuck, (who is probably from Sagiteron and likely has _all_ of thirty cubits to his name), has done. What you tell yourself when you hear the outstanding marks he is making, despite all of his rule-breaking, his gambling, his philandering. He forces you to wonder if there’s more than one way to go about the path to greatness, to space. 

But you don’t like to think about him reaching the same inky-beyond as you imagine for yourself, you do not like to imagine his name alongside the echo of _greatness_ at all. So, you do not. When thoughts of him come unbidden, you simply ignore them. 

\---

Eventually, you decide that it’s not fair to compare yourself to the _idea_ of Starbuck, your bunkmates’ impression of him, the persona he has clearly written for himself so that he can hide behind a facade. It’s not fair to compare your humanity to that of a fiction, the stuff of drunken revelry and starry-eyed girls all charmed to embellishment. Underneath the absurd, wild arrogance, there _must_ be a real person. Some boy from Sagiteron with a family, with fears and dreams and insecurities and all the other things which make people real, whole and riddled with flaws like a blanket worn translucently thin in the places most loved. 

Still, you’re shocked when you find these places. When he shows them to you. 

It happens like this: You let your friends drag you to a cramped, noisy party in an apartment off the Avionics Quad, and even if you didn’t mean to run into him there, you do. He’s wearing his uniform jacket over civvies, stonewashed denim jeans and a threadbare, once-white teeshirt with a hole near the underarm, things you notice as you approach him, condensation-cold cans of grog in both hands so you can’t get his attention without putting one against his neck. You do it suddenly, like something possessed you. You want to _talk_ to him. To set things straight, to find the flaws…something. You’re not sure, but you know it’s impending. 

He jumps, hand flying to the stinging cold, regarding you with wide, blue eyes and an offended looking grimace. Even _this_, just seeing him caught off guard and stunned by something as base as a cold can against bare skin makes you feel better. “Sorry,” you say quickly, offering him the can you just touched him with. “Didn’t have a free hand. This is for you.” 

Starbuck studies you for a long moment, still rubbing at his neck, eyes wary and chin tilted towards you like he’s trying to make up for the height difference. “I don’t take charity grog, buddy,” he says after a moment. “Especially not from commander’s sons.” 

You blink, realizing he’s distilled you down to an idea just as you have done to him. This knowledge makes everything easier, allows you to step closer to him and elbow into his space, determined to humanize him, humanize yourself _to_ him. “Not even _pretty boy_ commander’s sons?” you ask, raising one eyebrow. “Plus, it’s not charity. It’s a trade, in exchange for a conversation.” 

Starbuck’s eyes get a little bigger, and the corner of his mouth quirks reflexively into a smile. “Huh. And why does a guy like you wanna talk to a guy like me?” 

You shrug, and tell the truth. “I want to know more about you.” 

He nods slowly, finally cracking open the tab on your offered can and taking a thoughtful sip of it. “Most people do,” he says then, flashing you a sharp, brilliant grin with all of his teeth in it. 

It stings, but you don’t look away. 

\---

You end up sitting on a sagging, stained couch somewhere inside the apartment, in a room off the kitchen where it’s not quite as loud, nothing there but a few couples and a broken radio playing something too staticy to make out. “So, what’s you story?” you ask him, leaning close enough he can hear you. “Why does a rebel type like you join the Academy? Did your dad think the military would straighten you out or something?” 

Starbuck laughs, kicking his feet up onto the coffee table littered in cans and crumpled napkins. “Gods, no. Couldn’t be more off the mark.” You study the line of his neck as he throws his head back, the jagged cut of his adam’s apple, the tendons in his throat disappearing into the frayed neck of his shirt. He looks strange in civvies, just some country boy in a bar, not a colonial Warrior to be, not a budding legend. The realization makes you smile in a way you can’t really control, and the muscles in your face ache as you try to suppress it.

“Okay, what then? Why the fleet?” you ask, pressing the rim of your drink to your lower lip to conceal the twist you can’t chase from your mouth. 

“Honestly? You can’t even _imagine_ someone without a legacy might have the same crazy need to get into space? Are guys like me not allowed to dream big?” he asks, but his voice is easy, joking. There’s no real venom or judgement, no accusation latent in his words, so you press on. 

“I don’t know,” you say. “Just...ever since I was a kid I knew this was what I was gonna do. Everything was all planned out for me, and it was what I wanted, those two things lined up, you know? The dream and the plan. I just imagine you grew up differently than I did, maybe not different dreams but different plans...but we ended up in the same place. I’m just curious, I guess.” 

Starbuck sighs deep, then he fishes out a half smoked cigar from his jeans pocket, which he jams between his lips and lights up. “You want a drag?” he asks you, offering it across the couch, the smoldering cherry of orange flickering in the space between your bodies. 

You imagine putting it in your mouth, the rolling papers damp from his spit, and feel that same sick lurch in your gut that you feel when his name gets mentioned in idle passing, the one you have no explanation for. You shake your head, pursing your lips so flat you feel them go bloodless. “No thanks, I don’t smoke.” 

He shrugs. “It’s not complicated, why I’m here.” Then he looks at you long and hard, eyes twinkling with this youthful kind of madness that makes him look wild and young. A boy, twelve years old and in love with space, the type of boy you remember being. “More than anything else, I want to fly a viper. It’s as simple as that.” 

You don’t know why, but the pure, clean _want_ of it catches you off guard, makes your heart stop and start again, faster than it was before. His eyes are terribly blue, his cheeks flushed with drink and you grin at him, a grin that feels like falling, like a flight simulator, how you imagine a viper will feel when you finally fly one, too. The twisting of a metal body out there in the vast black middle of nowhere. 

The two of you tumble easily into conversation now that you’ve found common ground, a common interest. People pass in and out of the room and Starbuck leaves at some point to find you both more drinks, and part of you thinks he’s not going to come back, and that same part of you jumps and twists when he does, grinning wide and a single can of grog to share in his fist. You pass it back and forth between you, laughing about people you both know and instructors you both hate, and after some time he asks “So, pretty boy. What’s _your_ story?” 

You think for a minute, tracing a loose, meaningless shape in the condensation on the can before you take a sip and hand it to him. “Seems like you already know my story, huh? Spoiled, rich, easy life, military family,” you joke, voice dismissive. 

Starbuck smiles sheepishly, sucks in air through his teeth. “Sorry about all that.” 

“Don’t be, it’s true,” you admit, thinking of your father, and his mess of contradictions, the tapestry of rules and protocol and instincts which don’t always line up at neatly as either of you want to believe. “Well, what then? What else is there to know?” 

“I’m gonna ask you a really serious question,” Starbuck says, shifting forward on the couch and leaning into your space, eyes wide and solemn, mouth a chapped, soft, broken shape and you’re not sure why you’re looking at it, but you are. 

“Shoot,” you say. 

“How in _hades_ did you get a name like _Apollo?”_Starbuck bursts out, his eyes a flicker of blue so terrific it momentarily blinds you. “Is Adama some religious fanatic? I gotta know.”

You laugh, and it’s the kind of laugh that hurts a little, reaches your stomach. “No, not any more religious than your average Fleet Commander. My mom is responsible for Apollo, she loves long, old fashioned names. She’s the one who actually named me, and my sister, Athena.” 

“You have a sister named Athena,” Starbuck murmurs, shaking his head, puffing his cigar. “Course you do.” 

“My father is more utilitarian,” you explain, reaching for the can, your fingers brushing against Starbuck’s as you take it from him. “He named my younger brother Zak. He’s enrolling here, next semester.” 

“Apollo, Athena, and Zak,” Starbuck snorts, letting his head fall onto the back of the couch, closing his eyes and grinning around his cigar. He sends a glorious plume of smoke towards the ceiling, and you have you stop yourself from reaching out and dispelling it to tendrils with your fingers. The room is spinning a little bit, moving too fast and you’re feeling unsteady with overwhelm and _this_, this is why you don’t drink. It makes you dizzy, it makes you want to touch things that cannot be touched. 

“Hey,” Starbuck says after a moment, turning to you, eyes hazy. He puts his cigar out into the now empty grog can. “I wanna show you something. Come here.” 

\---

He gets up and you follow mechanically, watching him shrug off his jacket and toss it over his shoulder, the thin, tattered white of his teeshirt sweat-damp in the underarms in this way that you can’t tear your eyes away from, even though it seems like an unspoken violation of privacy to see. You’re not sure where you’re going. He pulls you outside, where the sky expands above you in all its terrible beauty, huge and black, the gateway to a million other worlds unforeseen, unimagined. The stars are innumerable, and you blink dizzily, stumbling after him. _This_ you think messily, as you suck in air that smells like smoke and city. _This is why I want to get to space. _

You follow Starbuck into a dingy alley between this apartment and the one neighboring it, where there is nothing but a scrub of weeds growing from the cracks in the pavement, an empty garbage can, and a partially deflated triad ball. There’s nothing for him to show you, and you’re about to ask what kind of prank he’s pulling when he cuffs one rough, warm hand around the back of your neck, and kisses you.

It happens so fast. Your back thumps into the cinderblock wall behind you, Starbuck’s lips drag across yours soft and wet and easy and his tongue flicks into your mouth and you’re instinctually sucking on it. Then you register the unfamiliar scrape of stubble against your chin, and rocket back into your body with a rage of stunned dread. Even as you try and push him off of you your lips are still working against his, your body arching to fit itself more closely into him and you feel so fracking drunk, drunk on the smell of his sweat and the sweetness of his cigar and the madness of this thing you never thought could happen _happening, _like a fire in your arms. 

If you had ever imagined this scenario playing out, you would not have thought it would be hard to wrench away from. You would not have anticipated the overwhelming wave of heat in your body, the rush of blood making you so instantly hard and twitching you actually groan into his mouth. But you have _never_ imagined it, never even _thought_ something like this could happen to you, so you’re lost.

Like pulling teeth, you shove him off of you and stagger flushed and panting along the wall. “What--” you manage to get out before you notice how obviously hard you are, and turn away from him. His body hovers nearby, swaying and still kind of reaching for you. You knock his arm away and utter a firm, “Stop.” 

He holds his hands up in mock surrender, taking a clumsy step back. “Hey. Okay.” 

“I’m not...I don’t,” you try and explain, heart hammering, mouth still stinging from his lips. You have no balance so you lean against the wall, sucking in the dry, cool night air, eyes shut though you can still see stars, even if you’re blocking out the sky. “I’m not interested,” you finally manage to spit out, and for some reason it feels like you’re lying. “Not in that.” 

“Cool, gotcha,” Starbuck says easily. You can’t make yourself look at him right now because you’re worried he’ll be able to tell how hard you still are, the confusing throb of your cock as you replay the incident over and over again in your mind helplessly. He steps away from you, gives you space. “I just, eh, thought we were flirting all night. Guess I was wrong; it’s happened before. But it’s fine, don’t sweat it.” He offers a non-threatening hand to you. “ No hard feelings?” 

You force yourself to grip his palm firmly, though your fingers are shaking. “No hard feelings.” You say and chance a look at him, just to smooth the tension, just to prove you can. 

And there’s that brilliant blue, terrible and clear and blinking, a color you want to lick into, a color that makes your stomach twist and drop again so hard you have to let go of him. 

“But hey, just so you know, the offer still stands. If you ever change your mind,” he adds, smiling with half his mouth. 

You nod, shaken in a way that feels bone deep as you suck in air that smells like smoke and city. 

\---

You try hard to forget that Starbuck ever kissed you. You try even harder to forget how fracking good it felt when he did it. You chalk the stomach-wrenching heat of it up to your inexperience with girls, you blame your drunkenness for how long it took you to actually push him off. Still, even with all the effort you’re exerting to try and rationalize what happened, you _cannot_ get that night out of your head, cannot forget the heady promise of his words, _if you ever change your mind. _

If Starbuck is similarly stricken, he doesn’t let on. You see him all the time, in the hallways between lectures, out on the field for basic training, his hair sweat-dark and plastered across his forehead on the Triad court. He doesn’t treat you like someone he can’t stop thinking about, or even like someone he thinks about at _all, _for that matter. He’s disconcertingly casual and friendly. He usually grins at you, punches your shoulder, asks you how things are and if you want to grab a drink sometime this upcoming week when you both have time. You usually decline, inventing excuses or exaggerating the amount of work you have, _anything _to escape a situation that will inevitably make it harder to forget the thing you are trying to forget. 

You see him with girls nearly every day, his arm slung around their waists or shoulders, his head bent low as he talks too close to some brunette cadet in your military history class when you sit down for lecture. You decide that he’s just _like_ this, chasing a hundred potentials, moving through the Academy with just as much intent to frack as he has to fly a viper. He has probably already forgotten what he did to you, the night getting lost in the shuffle of hundreds just like it. Somehow this makes you feel better, to imagine that this is just the way Starbuck exists and you are not _special_, you do not have to worry about it happening again or dealing with the consequences and hours spent awake, half-hard and self-hating, if it were to. You don’t have to think about his offer, which apparently, _theoretically_ still stands. 

Still, it fracks with your head, with your sleep. You spend as much time wondering about it in a cold, removed, rationalizing fashion as you do shamefully jacking off to a fragmented, half-denied version of it during the drowsy centons before you fall victim to sleep. You wonder what your father would say to you if he knew, if he’d be more disappointed in the fact you let a poor, gambling wreck from Sagitarion kiss you, or if that wreck was a man. You wonder if your father knows that beneath his veneer of gracious propriety, he’s a bigot. You wonder if beneath yours, you are too. 

\---

Enough time and enough casual, painless interactions have passed since the party where Starbuck put you up against a wall and licked into your mouth that you can spend time with him and groups and have fun, interact with him without thinking obsessively about what happened, what it did to you. You play Triad with him and learn he’s almost as good as you are, you let him teach you Pyramid, you sometimes lounge in the common room and share answers on flight-formation quizzes, something your younger self would have never even _dreamed _of doing in fear of cosmic retribution. You’d be friends, by any definition other than your own, which excludes friendship with people whose spit you can still remember the taste of. 

Still, it’s easier and easier to be around him. Sometimes you don’t even _remember_ why things were so hard for you for awhile, why your stomach knotted up irreparably when his name came up, why you left the mess hall when he was at the table with your friends. So, you think you’ve made peace with Starbuck, (with _yourself_ in regards to Starbuck,) until Zak comes to the Colonial Base Academy and fracks everything up.

You don’t even _know_ they’ve met each other until you’re out to dinner in Caprica City with your parents and Athena one evening to celebrate her acceptance to the Academy. Over a plateful of herbed vegetables you’re pushing around your plate with a fork, you hear Zak say (like it’s so god’s damned _easy_,) “Just wait till you hear Admiral Jeffers drone on and on about the cylon war. You’ll never think it’s interesting again. My friend Starbuck says--”

Your eyes snap up to Zak’s face, suddenly listening. “You know Starbuck?” 

He looks at you kind of funny, brow furrowing as he chews. “Yeah? We’ve all hung out together, right? We must have.” 

You shake your head, knowing full well you would remember if you had ever spent any time with both Starbuck and your brother, because even though _you_ may have made peace with the whole thing, you still recall the context and circumstance of every time you have _ever_ hung out with Starbuck. Even if it was just to sit side by side in the library to remind him to stop doodling Vipers on his notes and focus on his his problem sets instead. You would have _remembered_ if Zak was around for any of that. You would _know. _

Like most things with Starbuck, you’re not sure why you feel the way you do, but you know you feel unsettled by the knowledge that Zak has been exposed to him without your guidance. It sits with you like a fever, heating you up, making you ache. 

After you’ve hugged your family goodbye you and Zak catch a cab back to campus, in the cool, solitary silence of the back seat you tell him, “You shouldn’t hang around Starbuck. He’s fun, sure, but he’s a bad influence. Doesn’t give a frack about his studies.” This isn’t entirely true, and you know you’re being unfair, you _know_ you sound like your father. But saying it eases the nervous clutch in your chest so you do it anyway, even as you cringe at the self-righteous ring to your voice. 

Zak laughs, shaking his head. “You know, he says the same thing about you. That you’re a bad influence, too uptight.” 

“He _said_ that about me?” you snap, unreasonably outraged. You battle the confusing rush of heat in your gut that accompanies the fury, the desperate urge to ask Zak _He mentioned me? what else did he say? _You haven’t kissed that many people, and something inside you wants to know if you were a good kisser. If he remembers your lips how you remember his. 

Zak shrugs, grinning at you. “It’s true.” 

“It’s not,” you argue. “I’ve lightened up a lot since I first started.” 

“He said that too,” Zak adds, smiling a strange, thin-lipped smile at you that makes your guts twist up defensively. Zak presses on, brow furrowed. “Anyway, I’m not a kid. I can make my own decisions about who I hang out with, it’s not like having slacker friends is gonna make me into a slacker.” 

You sigh, rubbing your temples, willing the heat to drain from your cheeks. You wish you were _cool, _you wish you were the sort of older brother who other guys thought of as a stick in the mud. _Too uptight. _ “Yeah, okay. You’re right. Just...don’t want you to fall into the wrong crowd.” 

Zak laughs again. “Ok, _Dad.” _

That hurts, but you don’t tell him so. 

_\---_

It’s late some weekend evening, and when you ask Zak what he's doing he answers with a noncommittal shrug. “Dunno, studying,” he shoots at you without looking up from his book.It’s a clear enough answer, so you don’t worry about interrupting anything when you walk to his room to ask him some questions for a lineage project you’re stuck on. 

You knock once and he doesn’t answer, though you can hear rustling somewhere beyond the door. You call his name a few times to no avail, so you let yourself in, shouldering open the door with your notebook in your arms, eyes downcast.

When you right your gaze, at first you think he’s with a _girl_, and are surprised because he hasn’t told you about any girls, and you haven’t seen him with one since his last girlfriend left him before she went to an agricultural school on Tauron, and that was close to a whole yahren ago. “Oh,” you say, stumbling awkwardly backwards, turning away from the obvious tangle of two bodies on the narrow mattress of Zak’s bunk. “Sorry, I’ll just.” 

“Frack,” someone says in a hissing, low voice you recognize, and its _not_ your brother’s. You know who it is, you know the taste of his spit, you _remember_ it, you’d made _peace_ with yourself over it. Beyond your better judgement, you spin around on the heel of your boot just in time to see Starbuck shrug into his jacket, your brother arching his hips off his mattress to hastily buckle his pants, hair worked into chaos by someone’s hands. You shake your head. Not someone. _Starbuck, _Starbuck’s hands, which you can remember the feel of on either side of your neck, rough with callous but otherwise tender, _guiding_, not at all the way you’d think someone like him would touch another person as he kissed them. 

You don’t even realize what you’re doing, you just hear you brother yelling at you to stop from somewhere behind you as you grab Starbuck by the shoulders and shove him hard into the wall beside Zak’s bed. He’s overpowered easily, pliant in your hands as you throw him there, a sheepish, guilty half-smile plastered onto his impossible face. “Are you _fracking _my baby brother?” you scream at him, aware of how loud and wheezing you sounds, aware of the heat radiating from your face, which is inches away from Starbuck’s infuriating nonchalance. 

“Well, no. Not _fracking_, not exactly. Not yet,” Starbuck stumbles, trying to smile like his charm can erase how terrifically out of line this whole thing is, how _fracked up_ it is that he’d even _think_ of touching Zak when you—when you _think_ of him sometimes still, when he once told you, _the offer still stands. _

You feel Zak pulling on your shoulder, trying to pry you off of Starbuck and steer you out of the room, but it feels distant, irritating, a fly buzzing in your ear in its insignificance. “Apollo! Lords, let go of him, you’re being fracking ridiculous, I _invited him here, _he’s not-”

Finally, you release Starbuck, letting him sag against the wall and rub at his shoulder, which is probably bruised from how hard you were gripping him. You’re both terrified by and thrilled by that possibility, the idea of a mark on Starbuck’s skin, which you know is evenly tan and golden from the Triad games you’ve played together, at least temporarily marred by your blind, searing anger. You swallow a mouthful of metallic tasting saliva, and turn towards your brother. “You _invited him here? _Are you guys _dating_ or something? Do you even _know_ what Dad would say?!” 

“Not dating,” Starbuck says from behind them, but his voice is drowned out the Apollo’s rash, heavy breathing, Zak’s voice exploding and echoing through the room. 

“Who the frack _cares? _I’m here so I could finally _get away _from Dad and do what I want without him breathing down my neck, but here you are, following his orders like you’re in the fleet already, imposing _his_ rules and your _fracked up_ morality onto me!” he shouts, shoving you backwards, nearly into Starbuck who is still lingering awkwardly in the room, like maybe if he sticks around long enough he’ll still get laid. 

“And this is what you want?” you shout back to him, blood pounding in your ears. “To frack some idiot who throws away what little money he _does_ have at the Pyramid tables?” 

“Huh,” Starbuck says, finally sidling out from behind you and side stepping towards the door, where he grabs his boots and hobbles clumsily into them without bothering to finish the buckles. “Looks like you guys got some brotherly catching up to do. Uh, see you later, Zak. Apollo,” he adds, and the sound of your name in his voice makes you snap your gaze to him, a sudden, terrible ache splitting the anger in your chest to make way for regret as you realize what you have just said about him, this person who _would_ be your friend if your morality wasn’t _fracked_ up, if you weren’t a bigot like your father. Starbuck salutes to the both of you, still smiling his apologetic smile, and lets himself out of the door. 

In this moment, you cannot hate him or your brother purely, because you are too busy hating yourself. 

\---

The next day you visit Starbuck’s dorm for the first time, which in and of itself seems like an absurd thing, a _mistake_. You stand outside for a moment, shifting your weight from one foot to the other waiting for someone to answer your knock. Jolly opens the door, smelling very much like Ambrosa-sweat and sleep, blinking like he’s just woke up. “Where’s Starbuck?” you ask, trying not to sound desperate or angry or panicked, _any_ of the things you actually are. 

He shrugs, “If he’s not with you or your brother, he’s probably with a girl. I dunno. Try down the hall, third door on the left. He’s got a few in there.” 

The whole answer makes your skin crawl, so you just shake your head, thanking Jolly clumsily and rubbing your face as you pass down the hallway, past door after door Starbuck could be behind, balls deep in someone. You don’t know why it _bothers_ you, why you’re so dually disgusted and fascinated by the way Starbuck views sex as you never could, something that comes and goes, that _anyone_ could offer. Free of the constraints of relationships, gender, sealings, love, _attachment_. You know what your father would think about it. You _don’t_ know what you think about it. You wonder if you’d find it admirable if it weren’t for your father, and for the first time in your memory, you consciously resent your father for the things he taught you like they were doctrine. 

—-

A few days pass. You apologize to Zak more than once, and tell him you’ll stay out of his business from here on out, that you’re not just the commander’s son, you’re your own person with your own set of beliefs. You’re not sure he buys it, but he doesn’t seem mad at you anymore. You look for Starbuck but only see him in crowds and in passing, and end up compulsively averting your gaze before you can convince yourself to pull him aside. You wonder about his shoulder each time you see him, wonder if there was a bruise, if there _still_ is, what it looks like now and if it’s faded at all, if it is in the shape of your thumb, or something unrecognizable. 

You decide you’re going to go to a party with the sole intention of getting drunk, which is a decision you have never made before.You end up not following through on your promise because you finally run into Starbuck under circumstances you can actually talk. 

He’s not alone but he spots you first, nods to his friends and disentangles himself from a girl who looks like she might cry as he leaves, zigzagging through the crowd until he finds you sitting at a filthy table between two couples sloppily making out. “Drinking alone?” he asks, gesturing to either your grog, your lack of company, or both. He smiles with wide eyes, looking a little wary, maybe worried you’re gonna upend the table and push him up against the nearest vertical surface again. 

You study his face for as long as you can take it, which is not very long. Then you take a long swig of your drink and make yourself answer, “I don’t know,” which is not an answer at all, but is at _least_ a coherent sentence. 

He nods, gaze flicking nervously to the floor before sweeping back up to you. “I, uh, wanted to apologize for the other day. For the thing with Zak. I didn’t realize you didn’t know about it, the little shit didn’t mention you might try and kill me if you found out, so, uh, its not happening anymore. If you’re wondering.” 

You _were_ wondering, though not consciously, but your body still aches with a wave of complicated relief when you hear it. “You don’t have to apologize,” you tell him, shaking your head. “I was being a real jerk. I don’t _care_ what Zak does or who he does it with, as long as he’s happy. Or at least— I dunno. I shouldn’t care. I’m trying not to. Anyway, I’m sorry I lost my head, and especially sorry if I hurt you.” 

Starbuck looks kind of surprised, eyebrows drawn into two arcs as he glances around the corner until he finds a barstool, which he drags to the table side opposite of you, and sits down. “That’s pretty big of you,” he says. 

You’re not sure what he means, or if he means it at all, but you don’t care. Your body feels inexplicably overwhelmed with relief just to be talking to him easily again, without the threat of wanting to hit him, or wanting him to hit you looming on the horizon. Your heart is beating too fast and you didn’t think you were very drunk, but now you’re not so sure. “Maybe,” you answer, smiling at him. It’s stilted, but not forced, which feels good. 

“Nah, I get it. I mean, if I had a little sister or brother, I guess I wouldn’t want them fracking around with people like me,” he admits, looking you in the eye, gaze that wide, terrible blue.

You snort, laughing at him, at yourself, at how many messy, conflicting sensations are warring inside you. “You’re not all that bad,” you manage. 

“Oh, I dunno about that. I am pretty gods damned terrible,” he says, voice rich with both humor and self- recrimination. He winks and your stomach lurches. 

“No,” you sigh, realizing he doesn’t have a drink and sliding yours across the table so he can have some if he wants. He tentatively takes the cup from you and nods over the rim of it before taking a swig. You start talking. “I don’t even realize it sometimes, but I do this thing where I…I sort of _police_ what other people do, without really even questioning why it bothers me or why I don’t approve. Like—like _you_, for example,” you explain, letting your gaze flick up to Starbuck’s eyes even though you know it will make you nervous, make you want to quit saying what you’re saying. “I don’t _think_ I’m threatened by the way you live your life, but I am. Even though you’re... like...probably more evolved than I am.” 

It’s Starbuck’s time to snort in poorly concealed laughter this time. He shakes his head, grinning broadly. “I’ve been called a lot of things, buddy. Evolved is a new one.” 

You shrug. “Maybe the world would be a better place if more people fracked like you do, instead of waiting till they’re with someone they loved or were gonna seal with or whatever. Maybe they’d be happier. Less uptight.” 

He takes a long swig from your drink and you watch his throat ripple as he swallows, thinking about his lips all over the rim of the cup you’ve been nursing and refilling all night. As he sets it down he flashes a smile at you. “Well, I dunno about the rest of that, but the world would _definitely _be better if more people fracked like I do. It’s one of my few talents.” 

_Few?_ you think, wanting to point it out to him and correct it, tell him all the things he’s good at, hustling Pyramid, memorizing flight formations, landing in the simulator, Viper maintenance basics, playing Triad, getting under people’s skins. _Your_ skin. Instead, you say, “I bet.” 

He looks kind of surprised, looks like he’s formulating a real good comeback, but thinks better of it instead. “So...the legendary Commander Adama’s son accidentally judges people he has no business to judge. Doesn’t seem too hard to imagine, with a dad like that.” 

A reflexive instinct to defend Adama rises in your chest, then dies as you remember you’re angry at him right now. You shake your head, trying on the way it feels to be mad at your father, something you used to think was solely reserved for the ungrateful children of great men, or the poor children of unworthy men, neither of which you think you are. “Yeah,” you say, feeling the strangeness of verbally questioning the unquestionable on your tongue. “He’s just such a huge presence, a huge influence in my life. He says stuff and it seems like truth, it feels like the law. But now I’m realizing he was wrong about things.” 

“Parents usually are,” Starbuck says, shrugging. “They’re _old_, and times are always changing. It’s our job to keep that generation in check, too.” 

You nod. “Yeah? What about you, what are your parents like?” 

He laughs, pushes your drink across the table to you. “My parents are dead,” he says. “I’m one of those fracked up foster kids you hear about.” 

You feel terrible that you never knew this about him, that it never came _up_, that you never _asked _him when your own family has been discussed so many times between the two of you. You blink for a moment, stunned to silence. “I’m sorry,” you say eventually, wincing at how trite it sounds hanging there amid the party noises, beside shouts and laughter and a thudding baseline, the sounds of revelry. 

He waves a hand dismissively between you and shakes his head. “It’s fine, I didn’t know them. Plus, I sometimes think I’m better off for having it hard. Figured out the whole, adults-are-full-of-shit thing early.” He shrugs, studying you hard like he’s trying to figure something out, gain some insight about you from the lines in your face, the dumb, slack drunkenness that’s belying all the stupid ways you’re feeling, so many threads of fear and regret and excitement and self-recrimination all woven into an ever tightening knot. 

“I used to think my dad was good. Like, just _good_, a good person. And that I would be, too, because he taught me how to be. But you. Huh. I think you’re the one who’s actually good,” you explain in a rush, eyes cutting reflexively to his neck, the collar of his open uniform jacket because you _can’t_ look at his face right now. You just can’t. 

Still, even with your eyes at his throat, you see the rising flush. It’s the first time in your memory you’ve seen Starbuck color at something. 

“Apollo,” he says, recovering his charm easily and putting an open palm over his heart. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.” 

There’s a mocking lilt to his voice, but it makes your heart thunder and swell all the same to hear him say it. 

\---

Somehow, nearly knocking Starbuck out is the event which tips your uneasy camaraderie officially into the territory of real friendship. Something changes and you start hanging out more, making an effort to seek one another out, possibly fearing that too much distance will again place you at odds with each other, which is something neither of you wants. After time, it grows into its own beast: separate and natural. 

He’s finally your _friend: _not that guy who kissed you at a party once and ruined your self concept for a whole semester, not the guy you caught almost fracking your brother, not _Starbuck_ the legend, Pyramid master and famous heartbreaker. Just Starbuck. Another cadet, one of many guys you study with or go to the mess hall with or drink with on the weekends. 

Aside from shared studies or food or grog, you talk a lot. About Starbuck’s past, his numerous guardians, the bad ones and the good ones, his fervent fascination with space you haven’t seen mirrored in anyone save for yourself. You learn that he’s not actually from Sageterion, or Aerion for that matter, and actually _was_ born on Caprica, in a small agro town. You’re proven wrong about him, over and over again. You tell him more about your father’s inconsistencies, about the girls you liked when you were a kid, the ones you kissed and the ones who broke your heart, the ones whose names you can’t remember but whose freckles or braces you can still describe in detail. 

It scares you how easy it is to talk to him, especially when you _know_ there are things about each other you can never understand, differences in class and experience. But the ease of it, the wrung out, simultaneously excited and exhausted way you feel after you stay up late talking with him, lulls you into a false sense of security. Makes you lower your guard, let him in, and then he’ll look at you a certain way and your stomach will seize up in fear, you’ll remember him saying_ the offer still stands. If you ever change your mind. _

It’s not something you want to think about for very long, because it raises too many unanswered questions, too many feelings you have choked to silence for so long you don’t know how to _name_ them, how to deal with them beyond your knee-jerk reaction to quarantine them, strangle them until you think they’re dead. 

Thing is, they never _really_ die. You’ll think you’re fine, think you’ve discovered and accepted all that Starbuck is, but then something will change that. He’ll casually mention a threesome he had two nights ago after he left your room, he’ll shuck his clothes in the shower room after basic and you’ll catch sight of the pearly, inch wide surgical scar on his lower abdomen you have never asked about, taut and painful looking where it disappears into the bronze thatch of hair between his thighs. You’ll realize you’re _looking_ at the hair between his thighs and bite back the flicker of strange, wild heat which builds and ripples in your stomach, the heat that turns to nausea if you press on it with anything other that complete rejection. 

You want to know _everything_ about Starbuck, so nothing will shock you to sudden, confusing sickness anymore. Or at least you tell yourself that’s why you want to know everything about him.

\---

The semester is nearly over and there are only two final exams left before the blind, glorious stretch of summer vacation. It’s very late when Starbuck convinces you to sneak out in favor of studying. It’s an absurd thing to do and you _know_ its a terrible idea, but he tells you it will increase your rate of progress if you get out for a few hours, clear your head, breathe some air, see some sky. 

“Apollo,” he begs, staring up at you with pleading eyes full of pupil. “Come _on_. I’m dying in here. A guy can only review flashcards for so long before he starts going crazy.” 

Your insides coil fist-like around the way your name sounds when he says it, fast and eager and brimming with possibility. You’d think that hearing him say your name would lose its impact after the first hundred times, but once and awhile it will catch you off guard, send a flicker of sensation down the back of your neck like a draft from an open window. “But— it’s _late_,” you say, and it sounds whiney even to _yourself_, a weak excuse for someone like Starbuck, who will have threesomes after he leaves your room in the middle of the night, Starbuck who might not sleep unless he’s blacked out. 

“So?! It’s a beautiful night,” he explains, looking wistfully out the window to the sea of star-laced black which lies beyond it. “Don’t be uptight,” he adds. 

That always gets to you. Ever since you discovered that Starbuck once used that word to describe you to Zak, you will actively avoid anything which backs his point, supports his theory. You close your book with a decided snap and turn to him, sighing deeply. “Okay. Fine. But you decide where we’re going and plot our whole escape route, and take _all _of the blame if we get caught. Got it?” 

Starbuck grins brilliantly, stands up so fast his chair nearly clatters to the floor behind him. He shrugs on his jacket and grabs yours, dropping it onto your head before you can stand to receive it properly. Then he slaps his hand down on your shoulder, the feel of is resounding through your body, thrilling and frightening all at once. “Got it,” he agrees. 

\---

You follow him across campus, eyes locked on the shape of his back as he jogs ahead of you in the dark, jacket shifting over the broad span of his shoulders, hair shining in the glow of the lamps which flank the walkway you’re taking towards the south end of the quad. You’re heading towards the edge of campus where the manicured stretches of green and concrete give way to trees and scrub brush. You’ve only been back here when the sergeant ordered your unit to run the trails during basic; you remember the clouds of dust, the way the grit settled in the sweating creases of your skin. “We’re heading _away _from Caprica City,” you remind Starbuck, lengthening your pace to keep up, hands instinctually finding his jacket sleeve and hanging on to slow him down, keep him beside you. 

He flashes a grin over his shoulder at you, pointing ahead to the sign beside the upcoming trailhead. “We’re not going to Caprica,” he explains, pulling you along. “I said you needed some fresh air, right? We’re going to reservoir. To swim.” 

You instantly recall a die-cut pool of clean, forbidden blue from your run, lined in chain link. “No,” You say incredulously, automatically, though you’re still following him as he heads down the trail. “You can’t _swim_ in the reservoir, its off limits. Plus, it’s dark, and probably freezing.” 

“You never went illegal night swimming as a kid?” Starbuck asks, sounding like he feels bad for you. “Jeez. Hopping fences and skinny dipping in people’s water towers or wells or lakes or whatever was an important part of my formative years,” he adds, carding a hand through his hair, shooting you a look that’s half -sheepish, half pitying. “You’re missing out.” 

“That explains a lot,” you grumble, imagining teenage Starbuck wet and moonlit in some agro village outside Caprica, splashing with faceless friends, shaking water from his hair like a daggit. You rub your face with two open palms, wondering why you’re trumping after him still when there’s no way in Hades you’re going to climb the fence around the reservoir, there’s no way you’re going to follow Starbuck into freezing water in the middle of the night, three exams before the semester is over. 

You finally make it to a clearing and just beyond it the reservoir stretches before you, cool and black and reflective in the night. Starbuck searches around the perimeter, checking for security cameras. He gestures, indicating the coast is clear, and before you can talk yourself out of it you’re right behind him, jamming the scuffed up toes of your boots into the chain link and heaving yourself over the top. “This is stupid,” you tell him at least three times, and each time he dismisses you with a wave of his hand. You wonder at what point this will all become too much, and if you will have resistance left in your body to turn away from him when it happens. 

You land on the opposite side of the fence, gravel crunching beneath your boots as you tip off balance and into Starbuck, who catches you. “Easy,” he hisses, shoving you to your feet. “The water looks great, eh?” he points to the yawning blight of glass-placid darkness before you like a starless sky. There’s a metal dock which juts from the concrete siding and stretches about ten feet into the water and it creaks beneath your feet as you walk the length of it together, ignoring the menacing_ Do Not Enter_ sign tacked up to the gate. 

You cautiously peer at the water as it laps quietly at the dock. “How deep does it go?” 

Behind you Starbuck is undressing, the buckles of his jacket clattering against the steel paneling of the dock, pants rustling as he pulls them down over his hips. “I dunno,” he admits. “I’ve never actually done this, only wanted to. I guess we’ll find out, huh?” 

“Gods,” you mumble, turning just in time to see him struggle out of his shirt, pull it over his head wad it up into a ball before tossing it onto the rest of his clothes. It lands with a flutter like a white sail, and you remember that white flags are supposed to mean surrender, you think of one hundred Cylon battles you memorized the technique and outcome to for your military history final, which you’re taking in the upcoming centare. You think about how you’re _not_ studying right now. “We’ll be in so much trouble if they catch us,” you say, throat thick as you swallow. You can’t see his eyes in the dark so you have nothing even half-way safe to look at, your gaze sweeping up the divot between his pectorals which is dusted in fine, golden hair. 

He shrugs, strides to you and claps you on the back. He’s wearing nothing but his boxer briefs, grey cotton riding high up on his thighs. He hooks his thumbs into the elastic for a moment like he’s going to pull those off, too, but you shake your head at him. “No,” you say, jamming your index finger into the middle of his chest, keeping him an arms length away. “I might get in, but not if you’re naked. No way.” 

“Suit yourself,” he says, grinning at you, pushing your hand from his skin. You stare at him, knowing there’s a worried line through your brow, knowing your heart is the loudest thing there is out here. It’s so fracking quiet around you, nothing but the distant whir of the occasional security car from campus and the chirruping hum of nearby insects, so when Starbuck cannonballs into the reservoir it’s deafening. He does it so close to the dock the splash lands on you, drenching the front of your uniform pants and the arm you raise to shield your eyes, as frigid and terrible as you knew it would be. 

He surfaces noisily, shaking his head and gasping, whooping, arms pinwheeling so he’ll stay afloat. “Lords!” he hisses through chattering teeth. “Could really use some, uh, body heat in here, Apollo.” 

Your stomach flips over and you lean gingerly towards the edge of the dock to glare at him. “What if it hadn’t been deep enough to jump into?” you ask, peeling your now wet jacket off your arms and wincing at the unsettling shift of damp fabric over skin. “You could have broken your legs if it was shallow.” 

“Good thing it wasn’t,” Starbuck argues. “Now come on. The worst of it is over if you’re already wet, just _come on_ already.” 

You undress with your back to him, teeth grit together and skin pebbled into gooseflesh. You cannot believe this is happening. You cannot believe the way your flesh is thrumming, so alive, stinging with Starbuck’s impossibility, with the realization that you are doing something that you have never done before but he has done one thousand times. Arms crossed over your chest, you creep to the edge, shivering. “How bad is it?” 

“Not so bad now that I’ve been hanging out here for yahrens waiting for you. Just come on. Or I’ll pull you in,” Starbuck gazes up at you, eyes wide and expectant. You suspect it’s a hollow threat, but it does the trick anyway, because you don’t think you can handle his hands on your skin right now, you are already feeling tense with confusion, already feel like you’ve crossed over some invisible, unspeakable line once drawn between you and Starbuck. Grimacing, you lower yourself off the dock and into the icy water. 

It’s not as shocking as you expect it to be, though it does steal your breath, make your skin draw up tight and angry and your lungs struggle against the chill. You take the final plunge, dunk your head under and surface sputtering, inches away from Starbuck treading water. “Frack,” you say, shaking a spray from your hair, breast stroking past him to escape. 

You swim a half-lap to get used to the cold, reaching the other end of the reservoir and using your feet to push off from the concrete side, slimy and slick with algae. Starbuck leisurely paddles to you, hair dark with water and plastered across his brow. “Not so bad, right?” 

“Huh,” you say, still unsure. He grins a brilliant grin, more brilliant than the combined power of all the stars glistening above you, and you don’t want to be, but you are so fracking glad it’s you that’s out here with him and not Zak, not Jolly, not any of the pretty cadets you see him with on any given day, their coy smiles and pink cheeks when he looks at them “Actually, yeah. It’s pretty great,” you finish stupidly. “It was a good idea.” 

“See?! You gotta trust me more. Could learn a thing or two,” Starbuck says, the corner of his lips twisting up as he leans against the side, arms resting on the edge to steady himself. 

Your stomach drops so hard you forget to tread, sinking momentarily and swallowing some gritty reservoir water in the process, bitter and cold on your tongue. 

\---

Once the shock of the chill wears off you start to loosen up, pretending to play Triad even through there are no opponents and no court, just an imaginary ball and your wild, echoing laughter combined. He keeps pushing you under, forcing you beneath the surface with a hand on the crown of your head, pushing you up against the slippery side and saying he’s “covering” you. 

“I thought we were on the same team,” you pant, shoving him off unconvincingly because you are weak from laughing, from struggling to swim in water too deep to touch the bottom in. 

“I’m on my own team,” Starbuck says with a wink, splashing at you so obviously you manage to duck away from it. “Starbuck against the world.” 

“Pretty lonely way to play, buddy,” you say, feigning a pass at him. 

He pretends to catch the ball that isn’t there, eyes glinting in the dark. “Nah, it’s nice and safe. Nobody to let me down. Plus, I’m never lonely, you know me.” 

You have no idea why but it drives you crazy to hear him saying these things. You want him to stop, you want to reach for him and clap your hand down across his grinning mouth to keep his words from hitting the dark, you want to prove him wrong. Instead you propel yourself towards him, clasp one hand on his shoulder and the other atop his head, and push him under as he has been pushing you. Beneath the surface your legs brush together as he kicks wildly, the water between you warm as it licks against your bodies and your chest feels raw and bursting, too small and human a thing to contain so much feeling, so much _confusion_.

Starbuck surfaces, coughing water and wheezing in laughter. “Look at the Commander’s son now,” he pants, shoving you. “Assaulting fellow officers.” 

You shake your head at him, kicking off from the side again and swimming away from the waves he’s creating as he thrashes and backstrokes. It takes you too long to crawl up onto the dock; there’s no ladder and your arms ache from fake-triad. When you reach the top you sprawl out, breath huffing as you pant desperately, cold metal cutting into your back. Starbuck follows eventually and collapses beside you, the outside of your biceps pressing together as you catch your breath. It’s the opposite of what you wanted to do when you swam away from him, but all your focus is siphoned into these few inches of skin, all of you whittled down to this place where your bodies are flush, wet and sliding. 

“You should do this more often,” he says after awhile, turning to you. 

You shift away from him, putting enough space between your bodies that you can study his face from a safe distance, one that’s far enough away you can’t smell the smoky warmth of his exhalations. “Do what?” you ask. “Illegal night swim?” 

“Well, not _just_ illegal night swim,” he says, head rolling back so he’s gazing up a the stars for a moment before his eyes flutter shut. “But you know, break rules. Lighten up.” 

You look at him, the cut of his profile in the dark like the Caprica skyline, the dark sweep of his lashes against his cheek, the shallow valley between his lips. You get as far as imagining tracing it experimentally with your fingers before you realize what you’re doing, and immediately stop, chest bisected by a sharp ribbon of shame. “Maybe,” you admit, swallowing away a thickness in your throat. “But I dunno. I’m not very good at making myself take risks. I can imagine the consequences too easily, and whatever it is…it never seems worth those consequences.” 

Starbuck shrugs. “Try not to think about the consequences.” 

“That won’t come in handy when I’m a Warrior for the fleet. You have to _think_ about that stuff,” you tell him, reminding him that you have the same goal, that you want the same things, at least theoretically. 

He lifts his arm to gesture dismissively, rivulets of water chasing each other down through the coarse hair of his forearm and towards the crease of his elbow, where they pause to collect. “You don’t have to apply that logic to _everything_ though. You can live a little! Like, make mistakes, and _still_ train to be a Warrior. Trust me, I would know.” 

You think for a moment, imagining what it must feel like to be Starbuck, to have so much practice in risk taking, rule breaking. “Yeah… but I’m not _like_ you. It’s all or nothing for me. I can’t _make_ myself want to gamble, I can’t frack a ton of people and feel good about it. I dunno.” Your blood pounds in your ears after the solitary syllable of _frack _leaves your lips, mouth going suddenly dry. 

It crosses your mind that you might have offended him so you study his face to make sure, but he just nods, rubbing at the scar on his lower abdomen with his index finger like it itches. “Oh yeah,” he says, sliding his hand up and letting fall limp on his stomach as it rises and falls in time with his breath. “Zak told me you were like that.” 

“Like what?” you ask defensively, tearing your eyes away from him, to the crushing immensity of space bearing down on you, so much darkness flecked with so much light. This place you have dreamed of escaping to all your life. 

“All...honorable and chivalrous or whatever.” 

An affronted laugh scrapes out of you, and you cover your eyes, feeling overwhelmed. “I’m not _chivalrous,_ I’m just… not like _you_. I couldn’t be happy fracking everyone.” 

Starbuck snorts. “I don’t frack _everyone_. Just the pretty ones.” 

You lie still for a moment, remembering the first time you really met him, what he _called_ you, what his lips looked twisted around that word, _prettyboy. _You wonder why you can still see it so clearly in your mind, his head cocked, the stacks of cubits before him, the smoke in the air. Then that night a half-yahren later with Zak flickers across your mind, the guilty look on Starbuck’s face as he skittered out of the room and away from your fists, and you think about bringing it up. Asking him about this thing you haven’t revisited since it happened, since you became closer and it fell to the wayside. You clear your throat and carefully venture, “Is that what Zak was? Just one of the pretty ones?” 

“Zak?” Starbuck says like he’s surprised you mentioned him at all. “Yeah, I guess. Zak’s a good kid. Smart, manages to think for himself,” he explains. A flicker of hurt comes to life in your solar plexus, and you feel like what Starbuck has _really _just said is _manages to think for himself, unlike you. _You look away from him, back to the night, its emptiness. Starbuck continues, “and sure, he’s pretty.” 

You’re silent for a moment, chewing thoughtfully at your lip. You think that’s all he’s gonna say on the subject when he surprises you, clearing his throat and adding, “not as pretty as you, though.” 

Before you have time to process his implication, he rolls over onto his stomach decidedly, still-wet back shining in the moonlight, silver instead of its usual gold. He reaches for his pile of clothes and fishes a cigar out of his pocket, jams it between his teeth unlit. “You want one?” he asks, voice muffled, lungs crushed. 

“No,” you say automatically, shaking your head, shivering beneath the trails of water which fall from your hair and down your shoulders. 

“Course not,” Starbuck says through his teeth, side eying you with a grin. “You don’t smoke. Is it because you’re too good? Too _honorable and chivalrous _for a nice old fashioned vice?” 

You scoff at him. “No, it just never worked for me. All I did was cough a lot, every time I tried.” 

“That’s because you’re not doing it right,” Starbuck tells you, smiling around the cigar and tilting his chin. He sits up and fumbles with his lighter, the flame illuminating him briefly in a flash of orange as he sits there on the dock, dripping and with his wet underwear clinging to him, hugging the sharp jut of his hipbones and the planes of muscle in his thighs. He has little bits of bark and dirt and crunched up leaf stuck to the damp of his skin and you want to brush it away. You think of the scar between his obliques and shiver, shutting your eyes so you don’t have to see him anymore, letting the wave of sickness crash over you and break like the tide. 

He puffs on his cigar thoughtfully for awhile, then says, “You gotta hold the smoke in your lungs, breathe in all the way to really feel it.” 

You look at him again, a little dizzy with the cigar sweetness surrounding you, dizzy even though you’re lying down. “I know, I’ve _tried_. It just never works.” 

Then his gaze cuts down to you, pale and clean, a blue so painful it makes you feel like you’ve been struck backhanded. “Lemme show you,” he says. Your heart comes apart, falling to pieces in your chest, a million fractions still beating in panic. “Just open your mouth, I’m gonna exhale into you right as you inhale. Hold still.” 

You do. Just lie there paralyzed, numb with anxiety, blood pounding so hard you know he’s gonna feel it as he gets close to you, feels you wild and alive and thrumming and inches beneath him. He takes a drag on his cigar and leans over your prone body, so close you can smell his dirty hair and the handsoap from the dorm bathrooms, you can smell the salty, half-baked human smell of him beneath the water on his skin, and your heart is beating so fracking hard you worry it will shatter you. 

His lips ghost softly across yours, so soft you almost don’t feel it. And then you realize with a stark, terrible clarity as his warm breath huffs into you, that you _want_ Starbuck to kiss you again. You’ve wanted it since the first time it happened, you’ve wanted it so bad that it’s unbearable, and your brain’s been shutting off to protect you from the awful rage of that _want_, all the things it means that you’re terrified to think about. Reflexively you suck his smoke into you and he pulls away a few inches but still hovers close, studying you carefully as he says “Now hold it in for one...two...ok. Let it go.” 

You exhale explosively, hacking and coughing, eyes streaming down your face as he smiles at you, in this weird, hard to pin down way. It’s still a reckless smile, still broken open around his teeth, but theres something in it that looks almost sad. “Good?’ he asks. 

Your heart won’t slow down and you wonder, you _wonder_. You wonder if the offer still stands. If you’ve changed your mind. What he’s sad about, if anything, or if you’re reading your own stunned realization into him like he were a mirror of your own faults. Your throat stings spectacularly but you manage to say, “I don’t know? It kind of hurt.” 

He laughs at you, takes a drag and pushes it out of his nose like smoking is as easy as breathing, the edges of his silhouette shining and impossible in the dark. Then he stops laughing, a prolonged moment of quiet hanging between you bodies for too long. You hear a car in the distance, you hear insects singing in a quiet, frenzied chorus. “So… do you wanna try again?” He asks you eventually, voice cutting, strange and hard and lingering in the night. 

“Sure,” you answer, hands shaking, one twisting in the wet fabric of your briefs so he won’t see what he’s doing to you. You watch him breathe in, long and low with his gaze locked on you, so much pupil you can hardly see the ring of blue edged out to oblivion in favor of all that black. He puts his cigar out on the dock like he’s preparing for something. 

“Ready?” He asks through his teeth. He doesn’t let smoke out, and you laugh in a way that sounds strangled. Of _course_ you’re not ready but you nod to him, keep you eyes forced open and he leans down again and pushes his lungful of smoke into your mouth, skin hot and close. Without pulling away he studies your face with a guarded scrutiny as you hold the smoke in for one centon, two centons, then exhale. You look at one another, gazes hazy and cloaked in the dry billow of smoke, and then Starbuck drops his head that final breath and flicks his tongue into you, across the roof of your mouth. 

It feels like something breaks inside your chest. _Stop thinking_ you will yourself, hands rising beyond your control to reach for his wet skin and the reservoir silt sill sticking to it, the span of his back impossible smooth and warm as he kisses you and _kisses_ you and kisses you, rough and desperate and and clumsy like he wants this too badly to care about finesse, like he’s worried you’re going to stop him like you did last time. _Stop thinking, _you beg, and then you do. 

\---

You have never felt like this in the whole of your life. Starbuck is so hot and heavy and solid on top of you, chest pressed to yours as he holds your face steady between two wide, splayed palms and kisses you the way parched men drink water. You can tell he’s trying to stay slow and deep but he can’t keep the scrape of roughness from it, he can’t keep his teeth and tongue out of you because he wants it so _fracking_ bad. It feels so much better than you could have ever imagined, the drag of his fingers through your hair, his thighs tensing and grinding as he pushes one between your legs, his lithe muscle rippling under your hands as you touch him everywhere you can reach. 

Kissing him back is easy if you don’t think about it, if you just let your body take over. He doesn’t just taste good, he tastes like something you can’t get enough of, something you want to _drown_ in, and each time he lets go to breathe, you’re craning your neck off the dock to chase him, you’re trying to drag him back to you. It feels _insane_, terrifying, but you can’t stop. You drag you nails down on either side of his spine and feel bits of wet skin roll up under them, you pull fistfuls of his hair and groan low and involuntarily against his mouth swollen from your teeth. 

He pushes you against the dock and gets one hand between your bodies, fingers ghosting across the waistband of your briefs and then just below it, to skin warm and damp and creased from elastic. Your cock twitches, thighs convulsing on either side of his body as he continues to touch you experimentally, palm dragging across the outline of your shaft straining against wet cotton. You still beneath him, focused on the feeling, breath labored, skin burning. 

With a fist in your hair to keep you from kissing him he holds you down, pulls away from your mouth a few inches, lips still adhered to yours with a thin filament of spit. “This ok? Or are you gonna freak out again?” he murmurs. 

You shake your head, skull lolling across the dock, eyes hazy with stars and head buzzing. “I don’t know,” you say thickly, stomach curling and bucking around the blue of his eyes, the crazy, wild brightness of it. Then, the truth: “I don’t want you to stop.” 

He nods, presses his forehead against yours and just looks at you, breathing all over your mouth and it smells so good, he feels so impossibly perfect and you drag your palms across his neck, chest, ribs, whatever you can reach. “You want me to touch you?” he asks, thumbing across your lips and you bite at him, back arching off the dock so you can fit your bodies together, grind yourself against the solidity of him.

“Yeah,” you say, so lost in wanting him. “I do.”

He rubs his thumb into the divot beneath your cheekbone, face splitting into a smile so broad and feral you have to kiss his teeth, licking across the slick of them before thumping back down to the dock. Starbuck palms up your shuddering abdominal muscles and back down again, over the hot, straining bulge in your briefs. “Frack,” he whispers then, grinding his brow into yours and rocking his hips against your thigh so you can feel how hard he is, too. “Been thinking about this ever since that party,” he tells you. “Been wonderin’ if you’ll ever come around.” 

“Gods,” you murmur, digging your fingers into his shoulder, biting into the sinewy planes of muscle, trying to feel him more than skin deep. “I didn’t know.” 

“Well,” he says, sweeping your lips with his tongue, the heat of his palm pressing down on your cock until you hiss, half-thrusting to meet him. “Now you do.” 

He tugs your underwear down around your hips far enough he can free your cock from the fabric, fist closing around you and jerking slowly towards the head, his mouth wide open and panting against you as he does it, like it feels as good for him as it does for you. You’re so hard you’re twitching and leaking against his fingers, throbbing in his grip as he handles you, mind a mess of static and blind, thoughtless yearning. He props himself up on his elbow so he can look at you while he does it, one hand in your hair keeping you pinned, the other one jerking you off in firm, slow strokes. 

“Apollo,” he says after awhile, voice kind of awed like he just needed to hear your name for himself, but doesn’t expect you to answer. You couldn’t even if you wanted to, your breath is ripped and ragged in your throat, your hips pistoning into his fist as you writhe around on the dock. He twists your head to the left to expose your neck then drops his mouth there, licking and chewing at you pulse, tongue flicking out into the hollow beneath your clavicle, lips full and soft against the angle of your jaw. “So fracking gorgeous,” he murmurs against you, and that word is so much more grave and terrible than _pretty, _so much bigger that you come to the sound of it, shooting hot and wet onto the tense ladder of your abdominals, spilling over Starbuck’s fist. 

“Lords,” he says, finally letting go of your hair so you can move properly again, vision whited out, muscles still convulsing, breathe a mess of explosions. He shifts so he’s on all fours over you, smearing your come up to your pectorals with his palm, sucking it off you with a mouth so wet and sharp with teeth you cry out. 

You wait for the terrible rage of wanting him so close he’s inside of you to fade as you recover from your orgasm, but it doesn’t. He’s kissing all over your body, your throat and sternum, down as far as your own lengthy scar, the one beside your naval on the right side. He licks up it, breath wild and hungry as he asks you, “What’s this from? I’ve always wanted to know. Imagined biting it a hundred times.” 

Your stomach drops and you tangle a hand in his hair to steady yourself, notice how much it’s trembling, how much the whole of you is shivering in the dark. “I was playing on the hangar deck of the Galactica when I was nine...ten yahrens, maybe. My dad told me to stay away from the vipers, but I couldn’t because I was just so interested, so excited. I was watching the maintenance staff work on an engine, too close, and a piece of hot fiberglass flew off and hit me in the stomach. Got twenty staples. It was awful,” you explain, the story coming out of you in a weak rush. Your head is still spinning, the world feeling bright and impossible and _brand new_, Starbuck’s hands reshaping the material you’re built from as he touches you with roving palms. 

“So you _do_ break rules,” he says, crawling up you and kissing you hard with a mouth that tastes sour and tangy and with your own come. It shocks you but doesn’t disgust you, you just want his tongue in your mouth again, you want the weight of his body grinding you to dust on this dock, you want to know if he tastes as salty as you do, or if he’s different. He pulls away, smiling huge and wild again, teeth open and dragging against your lower lip. 

“Sometimes,” you say. 

\---

Dawn creeps over the horizon, but still, you don’t want to return. You sit side by side on the dock, wearing your pants still loose and unbuttoned, jackets pulled on over bare chests. Starbuck’s leaning against you smoking, his cigar smoke blooming before you both, spreading out in hypnotic tendrils across the water, which shines and flickers beneath the approaching light. Occasionally he’ll reach for you, pull you in by your lapel to kiss you, making sure you’ll still kiss back. You do helplessly, like you can’t stop. 

“So,” he says after awhile, exhaling two billows of smoke from his nose, coughing shallowly. “What happens when we go back to campus?” 

You look at him, gaze sweeping the rucked up mess of his hair, in ruin from swimming, from your own careless, grasping fists. “What do you mean?” you ask him. 

“What are you gonna do? Are we gonna go back to being friends, Triad buddies?” He glances at you, a line through his brow, something akin to concern. You want to reach for him and smooth it out with your thumb, but you don’t know how. Your shoulders are pressed together so instead, you lean into that pressure.

“I dunno. What are _you_ gonna do? Are you gonna go back to fracking all your girlfriends?” Then you drop your gaze, a stunted half-smile twisting your lips reflexively. “To fracking my brother?” 

Starbuck coughs, shifts his weight and claps one hand down on your thigh. The touch lasts for only a centon but it is electrifying all the same, sends color to your face and your stomach down into your guts. “I never fracked your brother,” he tells you. “But I got a hard on when you threw me up against the wall for trying to.” 

You shrug, swallowing, cheeks heating up at the memory, the things you overlooked. “You know what I mean,” you say eventually. 

“Well, yeah. Of course. I’m not gonna drop everything just because I finally got you to look at me. I’m not the kind of guy who’s gonna stop _eating_ just because he got a, _possibly limited_ supply of his favorite food. Did you think--?” He stops, silencing himself by taking a drag on his cigar. Then he sighs, lips soft and open around the smoke. 

You suddenly feel cold, and sit up to buckle your jacket. “Ok,” is all you can think to say, a aching kind of numbness in your chest. You don’t know what you thought, you don’t know about anything. You never thought about what would happen after fracking Starbuck because you never, ever thought you’d frack Starbuck in the first place. The future stretches ahead of you, blind and dizzying and confusing. You lie down, covering your face with your hands and rubbing the heels of your palms into your eyes, creating an explosion of stars which doesn’t clear your head, doesn’t answer any questions. “Frack” you say, grimacing. “I feel crazy.” 

You hear Starbuck readjusting, shifting so he’s facing you and edging a warm, tentative hand onto your arm. “Look, Apollo. What do you want?” he asks you, thumb rubbing into the crease of your elbow, making you wish you hadn’t buckled your jacket so he could sneak his fingers beneath and touch skin. You realize with a pang of fear that you want him so bad there’s no limit to it, no boundaries, no end, and it’s terrifying because there’s no _possible_ way you could restructure your life around something so big, something so reckless and dumb and impossible. 

“I don’t know,” you say thickly. “I honestly haven’t thought about it. I was in so much fracking denial about you, I just shut off every time something happened.” 

His hand stills, his breath huffing out onto you and you inhale sharply, sliding your palms from your face so you can look at him. He’s smiling, crinkles in the skin beside his eyes and you want to know what they feel like under your lips. “Well,” he says carefully, “Lemme tell you what I want, and you can see how works for you.” 

You nod, wondering how in Hades something could feel so huge, so life shattering. “Ok,” you say. 

“I want to get dressed properly and head back to campus with you before they realize we’re missing and expel us both. And I want to shower, because I’m fracking freezing, not to mention sticky,” he starts with a grin, eyes wide beneath the arch of his brows. Then his face softens, his eyes darting away from yours and back down to your lips “But after that, I want to be able to kiss you and frack you whenever I want to. I want to know you, eh, aren’t just here with me because we’re not on campus surrounded by people who’d give us a world of shit if they knew. I want to...frack,” he stops, dropping his head and burying his face in your hair, inhaling. “Apollo,” he says, voice muffled. “Dunno if you have any idea how bad I’ve wanted you. Nah. You couldn’t know.” 

Your heart is hammering, a metallic taste in the back of your mouth, the taste of fear, of oncoming change, of immensity. Inhaling raggedly, you slide a hand around the back of his neck, feeling so drunk and stupid and dizzy with the burn of his skin under your fingers. “Probably not,” you tell him. “But I can tell, now. And I feel it, too.” 

He rolls onto his back, forearm covering his eyes, mouth parted as he lets his cigar burn to ash on the deck. “So?” he asks, chest heaving in a great sigh. “What’re you gonna do with it?” 

You don’t know how to answer, you don’t know what you’re going to do with the vastness of his want, or yours, or the storm that’s born when they combine. It doesn’t seem like something that can fit on campus, or in your bunk, or even in your body. If you ask yourself what you _do_ really want, there’s no walls, no ceiling, no horizon line to it. All there is whatever’s present in the moment, the immediate. Like right now, what you want above everything else is to kiss him. To kiss him and to stop thinking again, hands wrist deep in his hair and dawn ever approaching. So, as you sit up and lean over him, pushing his arm from his face and watching him blink at you critically, that’s what you do. You crush your mouths together, tasting the groan you force out of him, tasting his fear, yours. 

\---


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> more of this!!! yeah I jacked some Taylor swift lyrics what ya gonna do about it.

You find him so impossibly surprising. When you thought about Starbuck fracking, how you imagined he might do it, you assumed he would be rough, dominant. The kind of guy who talks dirty and asks for exactly what he wants, but also knows how to please people, how to use his mouth and his hands and be gentle when he needed to be. You assumed he’d be _good_ at what he did. He _must_ be good given the number of girls who bat their lashes at him and trot down the halls with a bounce in their step after leaving his room. 

And he _is _good. Terribly good, life-ruiningly good, better than you could have written if you had been writing a paper on how good at fracking Starbuck appeared to be. But it’s not the kind of good you can explain. It’s not what you _expected_, what you might have been prepared to deal with if you had prepared for this at all. 

Before this thing with Starbuck started, you had only dated a handful of girls and slept with even fewer. And all of them had been exciting, satisfying experiences, albeit awkward and fumbling in moments the way any early experimentation is between teenagers. You knew sex would get better the older you grew and the more experience you gained, but you also thought it would stay the same in some ways. The same acts, the same positions, the same rhythm, only _better. _Longer, smoother. 

The first few times you frack Starbuck, you spend the next day so nauseated with yearning and overwhelm that you have to take bathroom breaks for the sole purpose of seeking a moment of privacy to hold your head in your hands and wrack with dry, confused sobs. Your body is a wreck, marked up from him in a hundred places, nauseated and shaking and _forever_ turned on. You don’t have _words_ for what he does to you. How vast and terrible a desire he’s ignited. The things he does when you’re fracking don’t even _seem_ like fracking; they’re not the kinds of things you ever imagined anyone, even someone like Starbuck, doing during sex. 

When he sucks you off for the first time it seems like an eternity that he’s between the maddening, flexing tension of your thighs, kissing up and down your obliques, licking your balls and even beneath them, to the crack of your ass where you never, ever imagined anyone would ever even _think_ to put their mouth. He fracks your throat with his fingers when he’s grinding against you, and if you gag on them he laps your spit up off your chin, smooths his hand through your hair, stares at you with such painful intensity it feels like being broken open by blue glass. He pins your arms above your head and licks into the hair of your underarms so that he tastes bitter and salty and musky and strange with your sweat when he kisses you afterwards, and you don’t even _care_, you don’t even have time or energy to be shocked or disgusted because everything just feels so fracking _good_. These are the things you think of as you sit behind the locked door of your dormitory bathroom, shuddering, half-hard, stomach turning. 

And he surprises you in other ways, too. In his tenderness, his _sincerity_. After the initial storm of hunger, his kisses will grow soft and heavy and slow. He’ll brush his lips against your eyelids and the space behind your ears, he’ll kiss the scar on your stomach over and over again, study it and rub his fingers across it like he’s trying to memorize the exact shape and length of that puckered, shiny skin, murmuring, _funny how we both got one, huh? _ He finds and lays waste to places on your body you didn’t even know existed, so thorough, so comprehensive it aches. 

A part of you hates him for it. You feel changed, ruined, _born_. You don’t know how this can exist outside the summer, how something so overwhelming can be _sustainable_. And you wonder how you can go back to the way things were before this happened, how you can return to your identity as the Commander’s son, the Warrior-to-be, _Apollo:_ top of his class and bound for glory, when you have this filthy, glorious thing happening to you in the dark.

Some days, you worry about it. Up late and sick over how out of control everything feels, how foreign the person you were before Starbuck got his mouth on you seems. Other days, you _cannot_ care, you cannot feel anything beyond the breathless thrill of combined longing and terror, and you follow him wherever he takes you, you trip after him into the heavy black of space. 

\---

There are no rules for whatever mess you’re falling headlong into with Starbuck by your side. It doesn’t fit the model of any of your former relationships, it doesn’t fit into anything you ever imagined for yourself when you thought into the future, thought about _dating_, about sealing. It’s unplanned and unwritten, so each successive day feels different, gives you a new perspective. 

You’re pretty sure you’d be consumed by the terror of uncertainty if it didn’t feel so fracking _good_. You’d give _up_ if you knew how, but Starbuck makes it seem so _easy. _He makes you feel like it _can _work, _will_ work, and you believe him, at least most of the time, just like you believe in his gambling systems, in his unorthodox Triad plays. He has that power over you, and over the world. 

Exams come and go, and after the fact you and Starbuck both stay on campus for the summer term. You have an internship at a military office in Caprica city and he, as he puts it, “has nowhere else to go.” So this… it’s _convenient_, it makes sense. It also allows you ample time to waste wrapped up in each other while the Academy is mostly empty, time to rationalize what it means, time to try (and fail) at talking yourself out of it. 

Your feelings concerning Starbuck are all over the map. One day you’ll realize you’re fracking crazy and this _has_ to stop, and you’ll spend your whole work day filing paperwork at the office and rehearsing how you’re gonna tell him _first_ thing tonight that this can’t go on a day longer. You’ll convince yourself your father has somehow found out and is planning on confronting you about it at best, disowning you over it at worst. You’ll decide you don’t _really_ want Starbuck at all and were somehow overcome with a temporary madness brought on by inexperience and loneliness, by his charm and charisma. You’ll invent an entire speech detailing all the reasons it cannot work, and prepare yourself to deliver it to Starbuck when he comes knocking on your door after dinner with that impossible to resist look on his face. 

But then, when he_ does_ come around, your plan’s shot to hell. Your resolve crumbles magnificently and you’re pulling him in past the threshold by his jacket, you’re putting him up against the wall before you even shut the door and kissing him deep and hungry and reckless and stupid. When he’s here, under your tongue and with his hands all over your body, there’s not a single thing you can tell yourself. The want is _pure_, real, palpable, endless. You can’t convince yourself otherwise, because the whole of your _body_ proves you wrong. 

And then, after you’ve had your way with one another and you’re lying side by side in your cramped, humid bunk with the covers rucked up around your feet, you’ll realize how stupid you were being. With Starbuck adhered to you with sweat and smoking a cigar in lazy, satisfied silence, you’ll condemn yourself for ever thinking something so good had to end. 

You’ll feel ashamed of your own fear and paranoia, disgusted by your overwhelming compulsion to follow rules, please your father, follow the plan that’s been laid out for you since you were born as Commander Adama’s first son. You’ll damn it all to Hades, mouth open and sucking idly at Starbuck’s bitten shoulder, his perfect skin littered in bruises from your fingers and you’ll think, _why _can’t_ it work? Who cares? _You’ll touch him and marvel at how fracking _simple_ it all seems when he’s here beside you, drenched in sunlight from the open window, the world smelling alive with grass and summer, his smile ripping you open and filling your wound and patching it up all at once. 

Starbuck grins at you after sex sometimes, rubbing roughly over your mouth with a calloused thumb, eyes half-lidded and a wreck of blue. “Done with me yet?” he’ll ask, pushing fingers into your mouth so he can feel the slickness there, teeth scraping down the line of your cheekbone and you’ll close your eyes, a fracking mess over him and think, _no, no, never, couldn’t be. _

It’s so hard to imagine ending it when you’re here, feeding off his impossibility, his contagious optimism. He makes you think you’re capable of anything, breaking any rule, taking any risk. “Not today,” you make yourself answer, rubbing your foot up his calf to the knee, feeling the sharp line of his shin with your sole. You shift against him, fingers dragging in idle designs down the outside of his bicep. 

He sighs, pushing his face into your throat, mouthing loosely over the marks he’s left there which will fade in a few hours, since you never let him mark you up in any lasting in way, fearing the explanation you’ll have to give to your friends who know you don’t have a girlfriend. “Alright, buddy. Alright. I’m just along for the ride,” he murmurs into your pulse, teeth against flushed skin. “Gonna stay as long as you’ll have me, and when it ends, I’ll just be happy I got you at all.” 

And that will create another twist of confusion in your gut, another mystery to grapple with. Because on most days, you’re not even really sure what the terms of this mess are, but Starbuck says things like _that_, things edged in tenderness, things you’d never imagine someone who’s fracked half the Academy would say. Instead of reassuring you that you might be different from all his other friends and girlfriends and frack buddies and bunk mates, it makes you wonder with a distant, sick kind of ache if you’re actually the _same_. If he says those things to everyone he lays in bed with and smokes next to, if he makes every person he’s ever _touched_ feel special, feel like something worth keeping. 

Beyond that is the equally troubling question which plagues you on the nights when you can’t sleep: why do you _want_ to be different than the rest? It’s a terrible, confusing desire to battle. You’re Starbuck’s friend, maybe even his _closest_ friend at this point, and you _know_ you want him to remain indefinitely in your life. It seems absurd, however, that this knowledge alone isn’t enough for you to sleep easy at night, it isn’t enough to soothe the ridiculous pain of jealousy which rises unbidden in your chest every time you entertain the very real possibility that Starbuck treats you just as he treats any of his fracks. That he doesn’t want you more than anyone _else_ he wants. 

You hate feeling jealous , so you try and chase it away with logic, telling yourself that you _knew_ he was like this from the beginning, that it doesn’t _matter_ how you fit into his relationships with other people. That it’s a stupid, foolish thing in the first place to want him like this when you can’t offer him a single lasting promise, anyway. 

Still, you want him. Sometimes, it’s all you are. 

\---

It’s the hottest summer Caprica’s seen in yahrens, plaguing the city an oppressive, dry heat which scorches your lungs when you jog outside to try and prepare for the physical rigor you expect from fall session. You make it back to campus dripping, face flushed and burning, hair a slick across your forehead and a chaffing rash where the strap of your book bag rubs against your shoulder. The hallways of the dorm are so cool and dark in comparison to the scintillating bright outside that you stumble disoriented and blind to your door, blinking too much. 

You’ve shucked your book bag to the floor and peeled half your clothes off before you realize Starbuck is in your bed, propped up on his elbow and staring at you while you undress while still flushed and panting. You try and glare at him, but it looks suspiciously like a smile. “Why are you still here? Playing hookey?”

Starbuck shrugs, eyes climbing across your torso, lingering at the hollow in your throat where sweat has collected, shining and dripping in rivulets down your chest. You tear your eyes away from him, fishing a water bottle from your book bag and swigging messily from it, thinking about how his hair is rucked up in the back, how he’s been in your bed for hours, how that makes you so bizarrely elated you don’t know what to do about it. 

“No, my class got cancelled,” Starbuck explains. “Who do you think I am, some hooligan?” He swings his legs over the edge of the bed and stands, walking across the room towards you in nothing but his briefs, smile so wicked and deliberate, you know exactly what he wants of you. 

“I dunno,” you say, wiping water from your chin and eyeing him over your forearm, heart still thundering from running, from his proximity. “I’ve heard a few stories about you, heard some rumors about that Starbuck kid skipping class. Doesn’t seem too far fetched.”

He waves his hand in the air dismissively before using it to reach for you, closing cool fingers across the flushed, thrumming pulse in your throat. Your eyes flutter closed, you can’t_ help_ it. “Yeah, well I’m a changed man. Started hanging around this Apollo kid. Scared me straight, a real good influence, real upstanding, teacher’s pet type,” he teases, breath still sleepy and warm as it ghosts across your lips he’s so close. “Taught me how to be good,” is the last thing Starbuck murmurs before fixing his mouth to the space between your clavicles, tongue swirling around a groan as he licks your sweat up, as he pins you to the wall with his body. 

“Lemme take a shower first,” you mumble uselessly, already shifting your hips to meet his, already sliding your hands up his back and into his hair, pulling him closer against you. 

“Absolutely not,” he says between rough kisses up your neck. Then he lets you go long enough to flip you over, grabbing your hips and pushing you back to the wall so your chest slams into white plaster under the weight of him laying himself down across your spine. A sound escapes you, high and weak and involuntary. This position terrifies you in its unspoken implications, your distant and vague knowledge of all the different ways men can frack each other, all the ways Starbuck wants you. It terrifies you, at the same time you _long_ for it. 

He’s never tried anything serious, just the pantomime of it. He loves to put you on your stomach, he loves to grind against the crack of your ass and drag his teeth across your shoulder blades, he loves to come on your back, painting bronze skin in hot ribbons of white. And you love it, too. You love to arch up against him and wonder if you’re suffocating under the insistent weight of him. You love not _caring_, just wanting so fierce and pure and awed and terrified. 

You can feel him now, the thick heat of his cock beneath the scrape of cheap cotton briefs, nudging up against your thigh, your lower back, your ass. He licks up your sweat, grinding against you solidly and you reach behind with a clumsy hand to feel him at he does it, grip the tensing ripple of his thighs as he rides you. He pushes off your body for a second to struggle out of his briefs, falling back to you searing and damp and hard, sighing as he aligns himself and thrusts against the clenching, humid crack of your ass. “Frack,” you mumble, letting him get his hands on your already loosened belt and work your pants off of your hips so you can be skin to skin. “Starbuck.” 

“Yeah?” he asks, breath against your ear. “You want something from me?” 

You shake your head, rolling your brow against the wall, pushing yourself into the heat of him. You don’t know what you want, he gets you so desperate so quickly, he makes you want impossible things, everything. Breath hot and ragged, you murmur, “Just you.”

“Just me, huh?” Starbuck says, jerking your cock to its full length, mouth open and panting on your scapula. “You could make a guy crazy. Could make a guy so full of himself,” he prays mindlessly into your skin, so hard and twitching against you. 

Then he drops down behind your body on his knees, lips dragging against skin perspiration-sticky and still flushed, until his breath is right on the crack of your ass. You close your eyes, teeth grit as you prepare yourself, fists tight and pressed into the wall. His mouth teases against you, teeth and lips at the dimple in your back, at the crease of your thigh, lower. 

He’s done this before, and every time it makes you so fracking sick with combined shame and longing that you sob into your arm while it happens, come so mortifyingly fast and hard you’d hate yourself for it if it didn’t feel so gods damned _good_. You hide your face, hot and still-sweating, in the crook of your arm and Starbuck holds you open, licks into you easily, hungrily, like there’s no shame in something like this. 

A broken sound wrenches out of you and you stifle it with your arm, smelling the spice of your own sweat, imaging how much sharper it must smell for Starbuck, who is buried in you, tonguing up the crack of your ass with his hands gripped in fists on either side of his head, kneading taut muscle, holding you wide for him. 

You’re close to coming in your own hand when he pulls away with an obscene smacking noise, rising to stand behind you again and rub his spit-slick chin into your hair, against the back of your neck, breath so heavy and labored. He ruts against you with his cock, hard and leaking, his fingers pushing experimentally up alongside it to feel you where you’re used and twitching. “Apollo,” he breathes, rubbing against your hole, licking into the hollow beneath your cheekbone. “Can I put my fingers in you?” 

Your cock twitches just to hear him say it, stomach coiling desperately around an ache inside you to have all of him, anywhere, any way. You swallow thickly and murmur, “I don’t know.” 

He pulls his hand away, kissing your pulse and mumbling “That’s not a yes. It’s fine, you don’t have to do anything you don’t wanna.” 

Beyond your will you reach around behind you, grabbing his wrist and encircling it, pushing his fingers back where they were, into the damp, yearning heat of you “No. I mean yes. I do want it.” 

“Frack,” Starbuck mumbles, thumbing over the twitching ring of muscle, already raw and wet from his tongue. “You sure?” 

“Yeah,” you tell him, hating how ripped and keening your voice sounds, this foreign noise coming out of you, unrecognizable and begging. You arch your back and spread your thighs as wide as you can given your pants are still tangled around your knees, push yourself onto the pressure of his fingers. You feel him spit onto your back, the thick foam of it dripping and collecting at the crack of your ass where he rubs his fingers through it, breathing hard against the nape of your neck between rough kisses there. Then, in a slick of his own saliva, he pushes one finger up inside of you. It’s a terrible slow burn, a thickening and a widening and you _cannot believe_ how good it hurts. You don’t have words but you’re making noise, a hungry, pathetic cry as you push yourself onto him, onto the sick, dirty pain of it. 

“Gods,” Starbuck groans as he fracks you, crooking his finger to feel around inside, pushing in and out so his knuckles drag against the clench. “You like that? You opened right up for me, real easy.” He spits into his palm again and pushes another finger in alongside the first, stretching you so tight you feel like you’re breaking, splitting in half, a nervy sensation so sharp and perfect it’s too good to be pain, too painful to be pleasure. You ride the overwhelm, nothing left to do but sob messily into your arm as you let him touch you from the inside out. 

He fracks you solidly with two fingers and fists your cock in his other hand, his own cock thrusting into your thigh as he rocks against you and it’s so much _skin_, so much feeling, so much sweat and slickness you can’t take it. You come with his name on your lips, forearm slicked in snot and tears and your own spit, your own sweat. You kind of double over against the wall, letting him smear the handful of come up your still spasming obliques as he ruts into your skin, fingers sliding messily from your guts, breath hot and wild and messy against you. “Frack, Apollo,” he mumbles, licking the topmost knob of your spine before sinking his teeth into the tense muscle beside it. “You’re unbelievable.” 

You let him rub himself to finish in the crack of your ass, drunk on the sounds he’s making, the breathy, strangled moans, the chopped up versions of your name. When he spills hot and searing against you you groan again, spent dick twitching in your own shaking hand, the whole of you feeling so wrung out and broken and used up, so full, so complete. Your stomach turns over as you think about what you’ve just done, the places inside you that Starbuck has touched that no one else has, not even you, the owner of your own body. You can’t believe how filthy it all feels. The kind of filth that you want to lie in, the kind you want to suffocate beneath.

\---

Starbuck peels himself from your back and pulls you to bed, both of you stumbling on trembling legs, collapsing together in a mess of skin and stickiness. You wait for your heart to slow, but it won’t, so you just accept it, sighing around the nervous thrum of it. “You ok?” he asks after a while, shifting to he can look at you, eyes bright and spots of color on his cheeks. 

You don’t know how to answer. You’re _alive_, and you’re amazed, but you’re also terrified. You shake your head, cutting your eyes away from his, studying the planes of muscle in his arms, the tracery of veins you can see blue and muted through the skin of his elbow. “I don’t know,” you say honestly after awhile, chewing at your lip. 

“That’s not a yes,” he says again, smoothing a palm up your chest, razing nails lightly across your sternum. “I don’t want you to fake it if stuff doesn’t feel good, I don’t-”

“Gods, no” you interrupt. “It felt _amazing_, you’re...frack. I dunno. It’s not that. It’s just that I’m still getting used to this. I don’t know how to feel afterwards, it’s too good,” you explain messily, gaze still averted. 

You expect him to make a joke, to quip about how he _does_ have that effect on people or something, but instead he swallows thoughtfully, throat clicking as he reaches for your hair, tilts you so that you’re looking at him. “You scare me,” he tells you, voice even, eyes wide and blue. 

Staring at him, you wait for him to continue, but he doesn’t. He just lies there with a fist in your hair, cheeks still flushed and skin adhered to yours in a million different places, brows arched like he’s waiting for you to confess something, admit that you are, indeed, someone he should be afraid of, just as he is someone you are afraid of. “Me?” is what you say eventually, brows furrowed. 

He nods solemnly, eyes cutting back up to the ceiling. “Sometimes you make me feel like I could forget about all the other people I’ve ever fracked, and just frack you for the rest of my life and be happy. Want you so bad it’s _crazy_. You’re right, it’s too good.” 

You lie in silence, stomach clenching slowly like a fist curling all its fingers towards the center of a palm. It feels dangerously nice to hear him say things like this, to imagine him wanting just you, fracking _only_ you, and you _know_ that’s a terrible, impossible thing. You can’t believe it’s you, after all the beautiful women you’ve seen him with, people so much more probable and logical for him to pursue. But then you remember Starbuck’s feelings about probability, about logic, and think that maybe you make sense. That you _do_ have the power to scare him.

You’re fearful and unattainable. You’re not gay (you don’t think so anyway) and you care what your father thinks about you. You’re a flight risk, where his other fracks might not be. “Well, what do we do?” you ask him carefully, rubbing your face with your palms, trying to hide the shameful beginnings of a smile as your lips curl beyond your control. You don’t know why but you feel giddy, you feel insane. Starbuck, who has had more sex than you can even imagine, wants you so bad it’s _crazy_. The whole thing feels unreal, but here you are. 

He sighs, rolling onto his stomach and shifting down the bed so he can lick idly at the trails of come that are drying in your pubic hair, crusty and white. It makes your cheeks heat up, these things he does without thinking, the small, terrible testaments to his desire. “I dunno,” he murmurs against your skin. “I’m not the type who backs down from anything that feels good,” he explains, “Even if it kills me. It’s why I want to fly a Viper, it’s why I’m _gonna_ fly a viper. It’s why I keep fracking you, pretty boy.”

You sigh deeply, stomach fluttering because you still haven’t gotten used to the way it feels to hear Starbuck talk dirty. “I always stop things before I get in too deep. Or, at least I try to,” you admit, hating yourself for it, for how cowardly and weak you sound in comparison to someone like him. He lays his cheek on your chest, head rising and falling in time with your breath. You try and smooth the mess of tangles at the back of his skull, fingers snagging through ash blonde hair. 

“Then why are you still here?” he asks you after a few moments. “It feels to me like we’re already in too deep, right?

It’s a question you’ve asked yourself a hundred times. You inhale raggedly, wondering again, _how_ this happened, how you ended up wanting someone so bad you don’t know how to quit, can’t even make yourself really want to. You wonder, with a pang of sick terror, if it’s because you love him. If you’ve somehow fallen in love with Starbuck, thus ruining your friendship forever, your life after that. But the thought strangles itself to death in your brain, falling to dust because you _don’t know _what love is, you have no fracking idea anymore. 

You shrug, fingers coming to rest at the indentation at the back of his neck, damp with sweat. “Don’t know,” you answer, the only honest thing you can make yourself say. “I just...when I’m with you, I don’t _want_ to stop. Not a single part of me wants to. I don’t know why you’re different.” 

“Well,” Starbuck says, crawling up the bed and kissing the corner of your mouth, breath smelling like your come, your ass, so many things that make your insides twist to remember. “I don’t know why you are, either.”

\---

You begin to realize that whatever you and Starbuck are doing together is at least in part made possible by the hazy, reality bending nature of summer. Your classmates are scarce and everyone has scattered, and something about the heavy, unrelenting burn outside makes Caprica seem _different, _makes you feel perpetually heat-sick and dizzy and drunk, incapable of making rational decisions, incapable of heeding your better judgement. What you thought might last one night out on the reservoir dock stretches into days, weeks, months. Extending beyond its constraints, melted and molded by the heat. 

Summer session at the Academy isn’t really the Academy at all, it’s lonely and sun-bleached and there’s no one there to remind you that you _know _better. It’s easy to get lost in the rhythm of it instead, lounging beneath A/C unit with Starbuck in your underwear, talking about Vipers and the stories you’ve memorized about the Cylon war when you’re not fracking, staying in one another’s bunks every time one of your never-there temp roommates goes home to the city for the weekend, stays at some girl’s house, doesn’t come back after a party. 

You see your other friends seldom enough you forget what it will be like when they all come back, when you’re all doing push ups together, showering together, obliterating the privacy you and Starbuck need to sustain whatever you’re doing. Or, at least the privacy _you_ need. You’re not sure what Starbuck thinks about this, how much he cares about concealing what he does to you from the rest of the cadets in your class. It’s not as if he works very hard to conceal his _other _affairs. It’s not as if he has a military legend for a father, a legacy to uphold, its not as if he’s a _coward, _as you sometimes worry you are. 

Jogging back from your internship office with your work clothes folded neatly in the pouch of your book bag like some identity you can shed is the only time when you feel like you’re in the real world. The route takes you through what once was your favorite part of the city, past the broad main thoroughfare choked with commuters, corporate skyscrapers all glass and aluminum alloy, reflective and brilliant in the sun. As a kid those buildings used to dazzle you, you thought they looked like giant space ships forever docked in the city, spectacular and semi-translucent, like mini-metropolises of their own all teeming with crowds inside. 

Passing by them every day has somewhat lessened their glow. You notice the grit on the windows now, the sunburnt, ragged looking people sitting on the steps with their cardboard signs asking for water, their pet daggits spread out beside them, drooling onto the concrete. The city tastes like exhaust and you have to pause at every streetlight, and since you’ve heard what Starbuck has to say about the Caprican business culture you don’t look upon the people inside those buildings with the same distant admiration with which you used to. Everything feels different, everything feels bruised. You wonder what you’re doing as you jog, where you belong, _who_ you belong to. If you’re just another suit and briefcase when you’re not in you’re uniform, or if you’re truly skin and sweat, spread out under Starbuck, longing for his teeth, his fists, anything. 

\---

The summer is dying. You can smell everything beginning to crisp and curl and and rot in the heat, giving way to fall as it approaches, bringing along with it all the things you temporarily choose to forget. First year cadets start to move into the dorms for their orientation, noisy in the halls with their families, poisoning the building with the type of wild, nervous excitement you lost halfway through your first semester, when the monotony of military routine set in like rigor mortis. You can hear them outside the door of your room, shouting and meeting each other with embarrassing enthusiasm. One wants to be a protector, the other wants to be a shuttle pilot. You know their whole stories, every one of their dreams because they were yours, your friends’, your class mates’ dreams. They’re surreal in their familiarity, and it’s only in overhearing them through the walls that you realize how very much you’ve changed, and how very much Starbuck has _changed_ you. 

Behind the closed doors, Starbuck calls them ‘fresh meat,’ and waggles his eyebrows at you, chewing on his cigar which you have only just realized you should stop him from smoking in your room; inspections for the fall are coming up, and you’ve grown too complacent, lazy, comfortable. You turn off the A/C and wrench open the window, trying to air out the haze in the room. You can feel Starbuck’s eyes on your back, and for the first time in centares, it makes you wonder who else might be able to feel his eyes on you, who else might notice the way the air has changed between your bodies. 

“You’re gross,” you tell him, thumping down at your desk. “They’re kids.” 

He widens his eyes in mock offense then takes his cigar out so that he can blow a kiss at you. “Aw come on. I was fracking girls my age when I was half theirs. Don’t be a prude, Captain Apollo,” he says. It’s what he’s started calling you after you recently confessed you’d rather captain a Viper Squadron for the rest of your career than rise to the rank of Commander like your father wants you to, expects you will. The nickname endears you to him, makes it hard for you to continue being irritated that he’s making your room reek of cigars, that he’s imagining preying on stupid, naive teenagers at parties come fall session. 

You think that first kiss from nearly a yahren ago, his hand at the back of your neck, the taste of him so sharp and perfect and dangerous you forgot who you were. Part of you feels like that was so far away, so _long_ ago, but there’s another part of you that feels like it was just last centare. “Remember when you kissed me at some house party?” you remind him, not sure you can look at him while you talk about this, instead studying a pile of your combined civvy clothes near the footboard of your bunk, a mess of faded black and once crisp, pressed work shirts now discarded and trodden upon. “You scared me so bad. Ruined me for sectons, at least.” 

“Ruined you for life, hopefully,” Starbuck says with a wink, grinning at you at your stomach drops, as it still does, as it forever might. You study him as the grin fades, replaced with a thoughtful placidity as he taps ash off the butt of his cigar into an empty water glass half lost in the clutter of your bedside table. “That was the night all this started,” he says eventually. “I think I got so crazy over you right then, when you pushed me off, told me no. I was like, ‘who the frack does this kid think he is?’ And I felt so confused, and I _never_ get confused over anyone.” He eyes you carefully, tries to gauge your reaction to what he’s saying as he often does when he’s talking in anything other than jokes and one liners. 

You swallow thickly, suddenly uncomfortable at your desk, wanting to be closer to him, on him, inside of him. Choking the seriousness out of him with your fingers because it’s too real, too frightening. And you wonder, not for the first time, why this whole thing feels so _different_ than anything else has before it, why he gets under your skin the way he does. And you wonder, not for the first time, if this constant, fracked up sickness is what it means to be in love with someone. 

So you don’t have to say anything to him and risk letting any of this slip out, you crowd him onto your bed on all fours above his prone body, searching the unsettling blue sweep of his eyes as he stares at you, as he grips your forearms so tight in his fists that the blood pounds in your suicide vein. “Come here,” he says to you low and gruff, and pulls you in by your neck like he did that first night, as you suck on his tongue like you did that first night. 

You keep being startled apart by explosive laughter echoing in the halls, new cadets shouting to one another, shouting goodbyes to their parents, just _shouting, _like the world actually wants to hear them, like the world is theirs_. _Finally you get up and deadbolt the door, but it doesn’t ease the clench in your chest, it doesn’t smooth the ripples of anxiety which make you feel scrutinized as you lay on your stomach between Starbuck’s thighs and suck him off. He pulls your hair like he always does, he cries out when he comes, loud enough you’re sure the people outside can hear, and the whole thing feels like it’s happening in a different world, this purgatory between the madness of whatever exists between you, and reality. 

\---

You try and survive the tumult of it, but eventually everything breaks, as you knew it would. Change comes suddenly. You and Starbuck are lying on his floor because you couldn’t make it to bed this time, naked and sprawled out messily amid stacks of books and papers, on a carpet littered with receipts, dirty socks, old homework assignments. As your breathing quiets and your skin cools, he crawls up to you on his elbows to kiss you, and somehow the whole universe falls away to leave only the sensation of his lips against yours, his tongue and his teeth rending you open, slick and hot and endless. You kiss and kiss, so long you forget how long it is, soft and slow and without the intention of it turning into sex, kissing like it’s the _point,_ like its all there is. 

Starbuck’s good at this, good at brushing his lips against you so fleetingly it’s like he didn’t do it at all, tracing all the bones of your face with his mouth, diminishing your existence to all the places where your skin is touching his, and nothing else. You’ve gotten better at just letting him do it, at closing your eyes trying not to fall apart when you realize hours have passed and you have to make it to Caprica in a centare, at realizing he continues to make you feel in ways you have never felt before. 

But this time, with the new echo of footsteps in the hallway, the new voices which soon will be old voices, a realization hits you. You and Starbuck are no longer just two best friends who also frack. You’ve _changed ,_irrevocably. 

You’ve become the type of person who lies on someone’s floor and lets them kiss you for hours, you’ve grown to hate the parts of Caprica he hates even if he’s not with you to tell you why he hates them, you’ve grown to love things about space you had never even considered until you found out he loved them, first. You think of Starbuck not only in regards to things he loves or hates, but in regards to _everything, _you think of him when you see a golden daggit streaking across the quad lawn after a ball, you think of him when you see plants pushing up resiliently through the cracks in the pavement downtown, you think of him when you’re alone and you wish you weren’t. He’s become the lens through which you perceive the world, and it’s too much. It’s a terrible thing. It’s what it means to love someone. You love him. Perhaps you have this whole time.

It feels like dumping ice water over your own head, and your blood freezes in your veins, stark and bitter. Suddenly overwhelmed, you roll away from Starbuck’s insistent, perfect rain and kisses and cover your eyes, gasping for air as you surface from whatever black waters you’ve been willingly drowning yourself in all summer. “Frack,” you say, a frantic, helpless skull’s grin overtaking your mouth still swollen from all the things he does to you. “Starbuck. What are we doing. What the frack are we doing.” 

He keeps touching you like what you’re saying doesn’t matter, chasing you with the infernal promise of heat, his mouth so close as he says, “What? We’re making out.” 

“No,” you say, sitting up, pushing him away from you firmly with one palm into the center of his chest, a chest you could sketch from memory if you knew how to sketch, a chest you might have been able to sketch from memory _sectons_ ago, back when you pushed him off you the first time, in that alleyway outside the party. “No, what are we _doing_ doing?” you beg, making fists in your own hair, hanging your head between your knees to try and vain to steady yourself. 

Now he keeps his distance,sitting back on his thighs and looking at you hard. “Hey, Apollo. It’s alright. What’s up?” 

Your thoughts are coming hard and fast like orders, like things you must say, must follow. “Oh my gods,” you murmur with your brow in your palms, sucking in air like you’re desperate for it. “What are we gonna do?” 

He shifts minimally closer to you, just a few inches across the carpet so he can try and meet your eyes. “Take a deep breath, buddy. We’re gonna just sit here until you get it all worked out and say what you’re trying to say. I won’t touch you if you don’t want me to.” 

And then that breaks something open in you so you’re wrenching out a dry, desperate sob, the kind that aches in your throat, the kind that splits your ribcage. Because you _do _want him to touch you. You don’t ever want him to stop, and that’s the problem. It can’t exist in the real world, a want this huge, it can’t fit in the Colonial Academy, in the fall session, in _Caprica. _It can’t fit inside _you_ any longer. Without meaning to you reach for him, grab a fistful of his hair that’s getting too long in front, the wing of flaxen always in his eyes so you have to brush it away every few seconds when you want to look at him. You pull him into you so his forehead is against yours, skulls grinding and the air between you smells like your come on one another’s breath, salty like tears, and you don’t know what’s happening. “Starbuck,” you say thickly. “I can’t do this anymore.” 

He blinks up at you, bracing himself with his palm against your bare shoulder. You feel a tiny, involuntary flex of his fingers against your skin, and then he asks, “Why?” like he can’t think of any reasons himself, like this whole thing is _fine. _

You laugh brokenly and shove him away, staggering to your feet, finding your pants and stepping clumsily into them so you can stop feeling so exposed, skinned and bleeding and at his mercy. “Because it’s _impossible_!” You tell him. “It’s fracking impossible.”

He follows you, shaking his head and trying to pin you by your shoulders to something but you keep twisting away from him. “Of _course_ it’s possible, what are you even talking about? Apollo, we send men into space in _flying machines_, we have ships that travel at the speed of light! And you’re telling me that _this_ is impossible?” He throws his hands up in the air since you won’t let him touch you, his eyes bright and scared and pleading.

“No,” you slur, backing away from him, not trusting yourself to hold his gaze. “It can’t _go_ anywhere, where in hades could it go?”

He shrugs, shakes his head incredulously, like he doesn’t speak you language, like he has _no idea_ what you’re talking about. “Why does it have to _go_ somewhere?” 

Again, that wild, cruel laugh splits from your mouth; you can’t stop it. “Because _I’m_ going somewhere, Starbuck. And you can’t come.” It stuns him silent and he just stands there, hands hanging at his sides, temporarily defeated. “I’m sorry,” you add, wiping your eyes as they burn and stream. “It’s not your fault.” 

Starbuck shakes his head and defensively crosses his chest with his arms, like he’s guarding his hurt from you. “Okay,” he says dumbly, turning away and pacing for a micron while you stare, face hot and blood pounding so hard in your ears you can’t hear yourself think. An ache grows in your solar plexus as you watch him, and it feels like being slapped when he finally turns to you and asks, “What are you afraid of?” His voice is more wounded than scathing, but there’s still poison, there’s still judgement. 

You balk, running your fingers through your hair and standing motionless, in the center of the room with your belt unbuckled and your back still scoured from his nails, wondering what, what _exactly_ it is that terrifies you about this. About him. “I don’t know,” you murmur eventually, thinking that there are too many things, too many variables, but well aware that the truth which lies at the core of this mess is not your father, not your classmates, not your sexuality, your name or your money or your illustrious future. It’s something unspeakable. 

“Come on,” Starbuck begs. “If you’re gonna run, at least tell me what from. Your dad? Do you have to get sealed with some girl to make him happy? Because that doesn’t have to end this, you, we can still--”

“Gods, no,” you sigh, shaking your head, hating the tremor in your hands that makes you want to reach for him, drag him in by the throat and _show_ him what you mean because you can’t say it, you can’t. “It’s just everything. It just can’t work.” 

“Apollo,” he says, and takes a single, cautious step forward. “It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, not with us, not with anyone. Okay?” 

You shake your head, throat stinging agonizingly as you try to keep tears from spilling out of you, face tilted towards the ceiling like everything might just drain back into your heart if you stay like this. You swallow and swallow, and before you think better of it, blurt in a wild, harsh voice, “Do you love me?” 

Starbuck’s quiet; you can feel the sudden resistance radiating from his body in fierce waves. He freezes, then takes a step back. “What?” he asks, voice sharp. 

“Do you love me, are you in love with me? What is this,” you repeat, half choking on spit, wiping your cheeks and eyes off with rough, angry palms. 

“Of course I do,” he finally answers, and it sounds like an accusation. You make yourself look at him, his eyes shot black with pupil, the scared, vulnerable slouch to his shoulders you so rarely see, like he’s curling in on himself, protecting his his heart from your teeth. He loves you, and you knew that, somehow, under all of this, in the space between his words. But hearing it...then you _know_ know. For certain. That you love him, too. 

Your legs are suddenly unstable so you collapse onto his bed and hang your between your knees, cradle your skull. “How did this happen?” you say, voice muffled to near nothingness in your hands. 

After a moment you hear Starbuck approach quietly, soft padding footsteps across messy carpet, his breath held. You shift over a few inches, make room for him to sit down next to you, which he does very gingerly so the outsides of your thighs brush, but nothing else. He laughs kind of weakly, then says, “beats me.” 

“Most fracking impractical, stupid thing that could have ever happened,” you mumble. 

“Usually is,” he offers. He inches his hand onto the small of your back for a moment, then lets it fall away like he knows he shouldn’t touch you at a time like this. You loathe yourself for wishing that he had kept it there, for always wanting more of him at any cost, for letting this go on so long even though you knew from the very beginning how it would end up. 

You sigh deeply and let yourself lean against him, the touch cautious, minimal. “So, what do we do?” 

He shrugs, shoulder moving against yours. “I dunno, Apollo. You’re the one who thinks I can’t follow wherever you’re headed.” He flops back onto the bed, covering his eyes with the heels of his hands and inhaling deeply. Then he reaches for his bed stand, rummaging around in the junk erupting out of the open drawer for a cigar. 

You choke, and then the tears are coming, harsh and unbidden. “I love you,” you mumble, trying the words on in your mouth, testing it even though you know full well it’s the truth. 

“Love you too, Captain,” he groans, puffing an exhalation out before dissipating it with his hands. “Ain’t that the worst thing you ever heard.” 

\---


End file.
